BearLibTerminal

BearLibTerminal

BearLibTerminal is an easy-to-use terminal graphics library for roguelike games and ASCII art. It provides simple APIs for text output, keyboard/mouse input, and simple graphics.
terminal graphics roguelike ascii text keyboard mouse input output

BearLibTerminal: Easy Terminal Graphics Library for Roguelike Games

BearLibTerminal is an easy-to-use terminal graphics library for roguelike games and ASCII art. It provides simple APIs for text output, keyboard/mouse input, and simple graphics.

What is BearLibTerminal?

BearLibTerminal is an open-source, lightweight C/C++ library for developers of roguelike games, ASCII art, textual UIs and console applications. It provides a pseudoterminal window with input and output facilities, sprite handling, truecolor images support and simple APIs for text output, mouse/keyboard input and OpenGL-accelerated 2D graphics rendering.

Key features of BearLibTerminal include:

  • Cross-platform support for Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, HTML5
  • Unicode UTF-8 encoding and text shaping
  • Flexible print and printf facilities for text output
  • Mouse and keyboard input handling
  • Sprites and tiles rendering
  • Truecolor images loading and display
  • OpenGL-accelerated 2D graphics via OpenGL ES 2.0+
  • Lightweight and easy to integrate into games or apps

BearLibTerminal aims to provide a simple pseudo-terminal API for developers to build textual UIs, roguelikes, ASCII art scenes or terminal emulators. Its goal is to abstract away the complexity of cross-platform development while providing a feature-rich API.

BearLibTerminal Features

Features

  1. Text output to terminal/console
  2. Input from keyboard and mouse
  3. Simple graphics like lines, circles, rectangles
  4. Color and styled text output
  5. Layers to handle full-screen and overlays
  6. Mouse cursor
  7. True color images
  8. Unicode support
  9. Font rendering
  10. Codepages and legacy graphics
  11. Sprites
  12. Tilemaps

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Lightweight and fast

Cross-platform

Simple API

Good documentation

Active development

Open source

Cons

Limited to terminal/console graphics

Less features than full game engines

Only supports a few languages natively


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