[ANN] tty 0.0.1 – a pure OCaml library for interacting with the terminal

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Hi folks :wave: just released tty v0.0.1 on opam.

tty is a pure OCaml library for directly interacting with the terminal, that I’m using to build Mint Tea:

This first release includes:

  • High-level Terminal module for controlling a terminal (with functions like cursor_up n)

  • Non-blocking reading of UTF-8 input from stdin in the Stdin module

  • Terminal Profiles for determining what color palettes are available

  • A Color module for parsing and working with RGB/ANSI/ANSI256 colors

  • A collection of 60 escape sequence functions in Escape_seq

  • a lot of room for improvement!

If you’re interested in contributing, there’s a few issues tagged with help wanted, but don’t hesitate to reach out to me on Discord/X: @leostera

Happy hacking! :tada:

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Looks interesting! Two questions:

  1. why not use GitHub - pqwy/notty: Declarative terminal graphics for OCaml ?
  2. does it work on Windows?

Cheers,
Nicolas

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notty tries to abstract away the terminal.

tty is a lower-level toolkit that just gives you direct access to the terminal.

For example, if you want to print colorful things you have to sequence the calls to Escape_seq.*_seq and print them out yourself.

i haven’t tested since I don’t have a windows machine at hand, but patches are welcome! :pray:

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I’m curious: it doesn’t look like you’re using terminfo(5) as the basis for the escape sequences you emit ? Am I misreading the source ?

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Nope, its currently just using the ANSI escape \x1b[ and other hardcoded strings – which I based off the termenv Go project – this probably makes it a lot less portable/comprehensive but the implementation is trivial atm.

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Note that Microsoft now recommends using VT sequences over the “classic” Windows console API. Almost any library using VT sequences can be made to work on Windows with a couple of calls to GetConsoleMode/SetConsoleMode and the ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING/ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_INPUT flags.

(Oh, how I hate Discourse’s mobile editor.)

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