Writing a command line program that needs a little more pizzaz? Ncurses just not colorful or high res enough? Or maybe you want to bring the demo scen

With Notcurses, Endless Magic

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2021-05-20 12:27:29

Writing a command line program that needs a little more pizzaz? Ncurses just not colorful or high res enough? Or maybe you want to bring the demo scene to the command line. Notcurses has your back. The demo is great, and looks like it can push out enough detail to pull off silliness like pushing an SNES game’s output straight to the console. What might be the most impressive element of the library is that while it can blit high res graphics through a terminal emulator with graphical support, it will also work on the basic Linux console, with no graphical system installed, by using some very old tricks. I know what you’re wondering: That’s all well and good, but can it run Doom? Yep. Come back after the break for a demo.

[Nick Black], the author of the project, started it back in 2019, and boasts a handful of contributors, and boasts support for C, C++, Python, and Rust. It looks like a promising project. It works over SSH, and even has mouse support. Not only that, the aesthetic really tickles our love for the demoscene, particuarly since it borrows some of those techniques as a fallback pixel drawing mode. If you get inspired and build a demo using notcurses, make sure to let us know!