dart_console 0.2.0+1

A helper library for command-line applications that need more control over input/output than the standard library provides.

A Dart library for building console applications.

This library contains a variety of useful functions for console application development, including:

• Reading the current window dimensions (height, width)
• Reading and setting the cursor location
• Setting foreground and background colors
• Manipulating the console into "raw mode", which allows more advanced keyboard input processing than the default dart:io library.
• Reading keys and control sequences from the keyboard
• Writing aligned text to the screen

The library is being used to implement a Dart version of the Kilo text editor, and is sufficient for a reasonably complete set of usage, including readline-style CLI and basic text games.

The library assumes a VT-style terminal, as used by macOS and Linux. This package does not currently work on Windows.

Usage

A simple example for the dart_console package:

import 'package:dart_console/dart_console.dart';

main() {
  final console = Console();

  console.clearScreen();
  console.resetCursorPosition();

  console.writeAligned(
      'Console size is ${console.windowWidth} cols and ${console.windowHeight} rows.',
      TextAlignment.Center);
  console.writeLine();

  return 0;
}

More comprehensive demos of the Console class are provided, as follows:

Example	Description
demo.dart	Suite of test demos that showcase various capabilities of the package
main.dart	Basic demo of how to get started with the package
keys.dart	Demonstrates how control characters are processed by dart_console
readline.dart	Sample command-line interface
kilo.dart	Rudimentary text editor

Other Notes

dart_console uses the new FFI capabilities in Dart 2.5 and later. As of the time of writing (August 2019), this is not available in a stable release. However, the package declares a dependency of Dart 2.4 so that dartdoc still works. For this reason, dart_console currently has a low pub.dev analysis score. This should fix itself when pub.dev rolls forward to Dart 2.5.

Dart 2.5 is currently available in the master channel of Flutter or as a standalone download from the Dart SDK install page.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Matt Sullivan (@mjohnsullivan) and Samir Jindel (@sjindel-google) for their help understanding the vagaries of FFI in its early state.

Features and bugs

Please file feature requests and bugs at the issue tracker.