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$ show dankamongmen/notcurses

[account ↗] [repo ↗] APPLICATION ★ 4686 160 ● active (last update 5 months ago)
reviewed by: deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash

Notcurses is a C library for building rich terminal user interfaces (TUIs) with full pixel graphics, multimedia support, and a widget toolkit. It provides both a full-screen rendered mode and a direct mode for simple output. The library abstracts terminal capabilities (terminfo, escape sequences, pixel protocols like Sixel and Kitty) and offers a composable plane system with z-ordering, transparency, scrolling, and damage-based rendering. It includes built-in widgets such as reels, selectors, menus, progress bars, plots, trees, and tabbed containers, as well as a multimedia backend (FFmpeg/OpenImageIO) for image/video decoding and streaming. The architecture is centered around a core C library with official C++ and Python bindings, plus command-line tools (ncplayer, nctetris, notcurses-demo, notcurses-info, etc.) that demonstrate its capabilities. Input handling uses an automaton-based parser for escape sequences and mouse protocols. The codebase is substantial and well-tested, though some areas show incomplete features and platform-specific complexity.

RATING7.8/10
QUALITY7.5/10
MAINTENANCEactive
DRIFTmedium
CONTRIBUTORS50
VELOCITY0.55
OPEN ISSUES328
CLOSED ISSUES1846
LAST COMMIT5 months ago
Files by Type (count)
C
116
Markdown
77
Other (.png)
62
C++
59
C/C++ Header
45
Other (.hh)
31
Python
18
Other (.in)
12
Other (.cc)
12
Other (.bmp)
10
Other (no ext)
7
YAML
6
Files by Type (size)
Other (.xcf)
8MB
Other (.mov)
3MB
C
2MB
Other (.png)
2MB
Other (.avi)
781KB
Markdown
580KB
C++
502KB
C/C++ Header
404KB
Other (.jpg)
346KB
Other (.bmp)
192KB
Other (.jpeg)
146KB
Other (no ext)
130KB

The LLM identified 5 files worth highlighting for reuse:

Implements a generic trie-based automaton for parsing terminal escape sequences, mouse events, and response strings. The automaton is built with a trie of nodes supporting character, numeric, string, and Kleene star transitions, and dispatches matched sequences to callback functions. This pattern is reusable for any protocol parsing that requires matching variable-length sequences efficiently.

file: src/lib/automaton.c ↗ | tags: #trie #state-machine #escape-sequence-parser

A lock-free memory pool for storing variable-length extended grapheme clusters (UTF-8 strings) associated with cells. It uses a slab allocator with linked free lists and supports O(1) insertion and removal. This component is self-contained (only depends on standard C) and can be reused in any application needing efficient storage of small-to-medium variable-length blobs.

file: src/lib/egcpool.c ↗ | tags: #memory-pool #utf-8 #lock-free

Provides functions for converting numeric values (bytes, counts) into human-readable strings with metric or binary prefixes (K, M, G, etc.) and locale-aware formatting. It includes fixed-width formatting (ncnmetric) for aligned output. This is a standalone utility that can be extracted and reused in any C project requiring SI/binary prefix formatting.

file: src/lib/metric.c ↗ | tags: #metric-formatting #human-readable #utility

Defines a flexible buffer (fbuf) structure with mmap/mremap-backed growth for efficient appending of byte sequences. Designed for assembling terminal escape sequences, it supports reset, rewind, and direct output. On Linux it uses mremap for low-overhead reallocation; fallbacks are provided. This pattern is reusable for any application needing a high-performance growable byte buffer.

file: src/lib/fbuf.h ↗ | tags: #growable-buffer #output-buffer #linux-optimized

Manages UNIX signal handling for terminal applications, setting up an alternate signal stack and handlers for SIGSEGV, SIGABRT, SIGBUS, etc. to allow graceful cleanup (restoring terminal state). Provides setup_signals()/drop_signals() functions. This component is small, self-contained, and reusable for any terminal-based application that needs robust signal recovery.

file: src/lib/unixsig.c ↗ | tags: #signal-handling #graceful-shutdown #terminal-safety
Last analyzed: 2026-09-04 13:59:37.988048
Next check: 2026-09-11 13:59:37.952945
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