Dart Consul - CLI "Desktop" System

There is no good reason why this exists. Another fun/joke project I picked up to learn me some more Dart. Did not mean to take it as far as it has gotten. But will probably not take this any further... 🙃 🤷 ☯

Seriously, ignore this. Look at this instead: https://charm.sh/libs/ Not Dart. But makes much more sense.

What is this?

A very basic, limited, rudimentary, and weird "desktop windowing" system for the console/terminal. Currently tested only on my one linux machine. Will most probably not work on Windows or macOS. Feel free to test and report back.

And it is written in Dart. Because I'm currently learning Dart to get into Flutter (and Flutter Flame) at some point. I think. We'll see.

Sorry, what?

No, I'm sorry... 🤷

Example Screenshot

Screenshot of the example.dart running:

Screenshot

Credits

Besides some obvious dart dependencies, these dependencies are used:

This fun project would not exist without these dependencies!

So... Does it work?

Well, it works on my machine... 🙃

You can try the included example.dart and see for yourself.

The basic idea is:

final desktop = Desktop(...);
desktop.onKey('k', () => doSomething());

final window = Window(
  "some-id",
  "Some Title",
  size: WindowSize.defaultMinMax(Size(60, 40)),
  position: RelativePosition.fromTopLeft(xOffset: 4, yOffset: 2),
  redraw: () => "Hello, world!",
);
desktop.openWindow(window);

It does support a "braille" characters based "canvas". This way you can do something like the example.dart.

Note that this canvas functionality comes from https://pub.dev/packages/console.

Example animated gif:

Screenshot

Here's an update with a quickly hacked together game skeleton:

Screenshot

To Do

The essentials I want to be done for a "Version 1":

  • Basic dialog system
  • Basic popup system

Some other things on my mind:

  • MAYBE Taskbar showing all (including minimized) windows
  • MAYBE Taskbar overflow with all remaining windows
  • MAYBE Blink(?) active (move or resize) window title (or indicate somehow else for small windows especially)
  • MAYBE Menubar system
  • MAYBE Improve handling of terminal resize
  • MAYBE Use the table/border functionality of the included dependencies
  • MAYBE Make scroll view, border view, etc first class concepts to use "transparently" inside windows

Done

  • Draw windows
  • Window title bar with controls
  • Console input handling (keys only for now)
  • Tab switching
  • Console mouse input handling
  • Minimize/maximize/close windows via key
  • Nested key handling
  • Move windows via key
  • Resize window via keys
  • Window hooks (state & size for now)
  • Basic mouse actions (raise, minimize, maximize, close)
  • Resize window with mouse
  • Move window with mouse
  • Help (?) button to show key configuration
  • Add basic (vertical only) scrolled content

Bugs

  • MAJOR Moving window fast, then moving another window, moves the first one again.
  • MAJOR Focus does not skip minimized windows properly.

Fixed Bugs

  • CRITICAL One off bug for resize control. Applies only for some Position type it seems?
  • MAJOR Titlebar controls do not respect window flags.
  • Move overlay shown when window is too small.
  • Drawing a buffer into a buffer breaks ansi in the replaced area. Potential fix: collect ansi sequences being replaced and add to Cell.after of the last cell. Related: should Cell.reset happen before Cell.after? seems to make more sense now.
  • Related to the previous one: ansi sequences leak into the drawn parts.
  • Moving window out left side breaks ansi. Potential fix: collect all ansi sequences cut off and combine into one. Placing this one into the first visible cell.

Libraries

common
dart_consul