guylangston/ConsoleZ

Enhanced Console featuring color encoding, fast rendering, markdown, html mapper

ConsoleZ

A modern multi-target (console/web/gui/tests) console rendering library

Why use this library? What use cases?

• Want a common interface/experiance across console and web apps?
• Want a richer output (colours, progress graphs)?
• Want to make a retro-console game like Tetris, Snake?
• Want Markdown in the console?

What this library does NOT do:

• Console Argument parsing
• Midnight-Commander like console forms. Rather use the wonderful GUI.cs
• Unix support (Windows-only at this stage)

Key Features (done vs. in-progress):

• Windows 10 Console: ANSI Escape Codes
• Alternative human readble inline colour formatting "^red;Error:^; Message"
• Fast full-screen updates. Allows Retro Console games. https://onelonecoder.com/olcconsolegameengine/
• Unified IConsole working with HTML, WinForms, Console
• UI Components : Percentage Complete Graph, etc
• ASCII large fonts
• Markdown formatting
• Safe Chaining (write to file)

NuGet Packages

• ConsoleZ Terminal
• ASP.NET Core

Status

This library is ALPHA status. Meaning core interfaces may change. At present this library is not ready for production.

Please create a github issue for any features/bugs.

Screenshots

Key C# interface

What will I be programming against?

public interface ITextWriter
{
    int WriteLine(string s);        // We don't use Write, rather update the whole line
    int WriteFormatted(FormattableString formatted);
}

public interface IConsole : ITextWriter
{
    string Handle { get; }
    int Version { get;  }

    int Width { get; }
    int Height { get; }
    int DisplayStart { get;  }
    int DisplayEnd { get; }

    void UpdateLine(int line, string txt);
    void UpdateFormatted(int line, FormattableString formatted);
}

The Idea?

In my current project we have lots of command logic that output calculation reports to the console. As the functionaliy matures, or reaches a larger audience, the it gets ported to the web.

Would it not be great if the console and html versions share the same interface and rendering abilities:

• Console Renders Markdown with ASCII-art and Console standard colours (Find closest Color -< ConsoleColour)
• Html Renders to a virtual console (thread-safe) and renders HTML Markdown

Features:

• Markdown is the common format (Rendering to Console or HTML)
• ANSI escaping (+ HTML mapping)
• Threadsafe for the web (many IVirtualConsoles at once)
• Easy inline colours "Hello ^red;World^;" <-> string.Format("Hello {0}World{1}", Color.Red, Color.Default)
• Updating progress bars [###... 50%]
• Standard ASP.NET core console terminal
• Very Fast console update/FPS see: https://github.com/OneLoneCoder/videos/blob/master/olcConsoleGameEngine.h

Stretch:

• Wolfram-style cell input/output consoles
• SignalR polling to update console (vs polling ever sec)

Getting started

You can start with a normal console app then:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var cons = AnsiConsole.Singleton;
    cons.WriteLine("Hello World");
    cons.WriteLine("Have a ^red;wonderful^; day!");
    var idx = cons.WriteLine("Replace me");
    cons.UpdateLine(ids, "I was replaced. ;-)");
}

Research / Related projects

• https://github.com/tomakita/Colorful.Console
• https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/3xgd2w/good_markdown_viewer_in_terminal/
• https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36833/markdown-console-application
• https://github.com/kneufeld/consolemd
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23904274/is-there-a-way-to-get-colored-text-in-github-flavored-markdown/41043795
• ANSI escape chars: http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/BuildyourownCommandLinewithANSIescapecodes.html
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34073467/ansi-coloring-console-output-with-net
• https://github.com/silkfire/Pastel

Search Terms:

• "color console C#"
• "enhanced c# console"