Terminal UI

uniview's TUI stack renders React or Solid components straight to a terminal — no DOM, no browser. Panels, lists, mouse, focus, markdown, syntax highlighting, charts.

Every screenshot on these pages is a real frame. They are generated by running the example and swapping one line — AnsiCellSurface for SvgCellSurface — so they cannot drift from the code that produces them.

The whole point: the framework is not the renderer

The same application, written once in React and once in Solid, produces byte-identical output:

$ pnpm --filter @uniview/tui-lazygit-demo  snapshot   # React
$ pnpm --filter @uniview/tui-lazygit-solid snapshot   # Solid
$ cmp lazygit-react.svg lazygit-solid.svg && echo identical
identical

That is not a coincidence — it is the architecture. React and Solid each produce a serialized UINode tree, and everything below that point is shared:

React ─┐
       ├─→ UINode tree ─→ internal host layer ─→ tui-core ─→ cells ─→ terminal
Solid ─┘

Prop interpretation, layout, painting, diffing and input routing all live below the framework line. Adding a third framework means writing a renderer that emits UINode — nothing else changes.

Not just boxes and text

Charts are built on eighth-block and braille sub-cell rasterisation, so a line plot gets 2×4 the resolution of the character grid:

And since tiles are just colored boxes, a whole game needs no new render primitive — here is 2048 being played by a trained n-tuple network with expectimax search:

Where to go next

• Getting started — render your first frame.
• Components — panels, lists, markdown, diffs, input.
• Charts — bars, sparklines, gauges, line plots, scatter.
• Solid — the Solid binding, and three traps that will bite you.
• Examples — the four demos, and how to run them.