pixel8-tui

The Pixel8 fantasy console in your terminal — the same shell, editors and carts the windowed pixel8 binary drives, rendered over sixel where the terminal supports it (via a pure-Rust encoder) and unicode half-blocks everywhere else.

cargo install pixel8-tui
pixel8-tui                     boot the console
pixel8-tui mygame              boot with a project or cart loaded
pixel8-tui run mygame.png      boot, load, and run immediately

Ctrl+Q quits. Game buttons need real key press/release events, so on Linux one of these is required: a terminal speaking the kitty keyboard protocol (kitty, foot, alacritty, WezTerm, ghostty...), or read access to the kernel's input devices — one-time setup:

sudo usermod -aG input $USER
newgrp input      # applies it to the current shell; new logins have it automatically

With neither, pixel8-tui exits with these instructions (set PIXEL8_TUI_NO_RAW_KEYS=1 to accept degraded, autorepeat-inferred input instead, e.g. over SSH). See docs/TUI.md for the full list of caveats and knobs.

This crate is a thin frontend: the console itself lives in the pixel8-console library, which this binary depends on with the window stack (winit/wgpu) switched off.