Cross-platform Terminal Manipulation Library

Have you ever been disappointed when a terminal library for the Rust language was only written for UNIX systems? Crossterm provides clearing, input handling, styling, cursor movement and terminal actions for both Windows and UNIX systems.

Crossterm aims to be simple and easy to call in code. Through the simplicity of Crossterm, you do not have to worry about the platform you are working with.

This crate supports all UNIX and Windows terminals down to Windows 7 (not all terminals are tested, see Tested Terminals for more info).

Note on Migration

You may have noticed that Crossterm has been changing very quickly with the latest versions. We have done a lot of API-breaking changes by renaming functions, commands, changing the exports, improving the encapsulation, etc.. However, all of this happens to improve the library and make it better and ready for a possible 1.0 release. We want to stick to the Command API and remove all other ways to use crossterm. Try to use this API and change your code accordingly. This way you will survive or overcome major migration problems ;).

We hope you can understand this, feel free to ask around in discord if you have questions. For up-to-date examples, have a look at the examples repository. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Table of Contents

• Features
  • Tested Terminals
• Getting Started
  • Feature Flags
• Other Resources
• Used By
• Contributing

Features

• Cross-platform
• Multi-threaded (send, sync)
• Detailed documentation
• Few dependencies
• Full control over output buffer
• Cursor (feature cursor)
  • Move the cursor N times (up, down, left, right)
  • Set/get the cursor position
  • Store the cursor position and restore to it later
  • Hide/show the cursor
  • Enable/disable cursor blinking (not all terminals do support this feature)
• Styled output (feature style)
  • Foreground color (16 base colors)
  • Background color (16 base colors)
  • 256 (ANSI) color support (Windows 10 and UNIX only)
  • RGB color support (Windows 10 and UNIX only)
  • Text attributes like bold, italic, underscore, crossed, etc.
• Terminal (feature terminal)
  • Clear (all lines, current line, from cursor down and up, until new line)
  • Scroll up, down
  • Set/get the terminal size
  • Exit current process
• Input (feature input)
  • Read character
  • Read line
  • Read key input events (async / sync)
  • Read mouse input events (press, release, position, button)
• Screen (feature screen)
  • Alternate screen
  • Raw screen

Tested Terminals

• Windows Powershell
  • Windows 10 (Pro)
• Windows CMD
  • Windows 10 (Pro)
  • Windows 8.1 (N)
• Ubuntu Desktop Terminal
  • Ubuntu 17.10
• (Arch, Manjaro) KDE Konsole
• Linux Mint

This crate supports all UNIX terminals and Windows terminals down to Windows 7; however, not all of the terminals have been tested. If you have used this library for a terminal other than the above list without issues, then feel free to add it to the above list - I really would appreciate it!

Getting Started

[dependencies]
crossterm = "0.13"

use std::io::{stdout, Write};

use crossterm::{execute, ExecutableCommand, style::{Attribute, Color, SetForegroundColor, SetBackgroundColor, ResetColor}, Output, Result};

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    // using the macro
    execute!(
        stdout(),
        SetForegroundColor(Color::Blue),
        SetBackgroundColor(Color::Red),
        Output("Styled text here."),
        ResetColor
    )?;

    // or using functions
    stdout()
        .execute(SetForegroundColor(Color::Blue))?
        .execute(SetBackgroundColor(Color::Red))?
        .execute(Output("Styled text here."))?
        .execute(ResetColor)?;

    Ok(())
}

Checkout this list with all possible commands.

Feature Flags

All features are enabled by default. You can disable default features and enable some of them only.

[dependencies.crossterm]
version = "0.12"
default-features = false        # Disable default features
features = ["cursor", "screen"] # Enable required features only

Other Resources

• API documentation
• Examples repository

Used By

• Broot
• Cursive
• TUI
• Rust-sloth

Contributing

I highly appreciate when anyone contributes to this crate. Before you do, please, read the Contributing guidelines.

Authors

• Timon Post - Project Owner & creator

Support

Would you like Crossterm to be even more gorgeous and beautiful? You can help with this by donating.

License

This project, crossterm and all it's sub-crates: crossterm_screen, crossterm_cursor, crossterm_style, crossterm_input, crossterm_terminal, crossterm_winapi, crossterm_utils are licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.