Brick: A Declarative Terminal User Interface Programming Library

Brick is an inventive terminal user interface (TUI) library offered by GitHub designed to facilitate the development of terminal-based applications. The remarkable nature of this project lies in its ease of use and immense suitability for developers aspiring to create rich, feature-packed user interfaces for terminal-based programs.

Project Overview:

Brick, with its high-level interfaces and flexible abstractions, seeks to solve the challenges associated with developing terminal-based programs. It connects the disparity between advanced programming needs and terminal peculiarities in a user-friendly way. The main target audience of this project are developers who relish the simplicity and efficiency of terminal applications but seek enhanced UI features.

Project Features:

The key attributes hidden under Brick's sleeve are its widgets and event-handling mechanism. The library offers an array of widgets, each capable of rendering itself and handling events. Furthermore, Brick supports horizontal and vertical box layout, list box, editable text box, and more. To illustrate, a developer can easily build an interactive text editor using the editable text box widget and handle save events using Brick's event types.

Technology Stack:

Brick is developed using Haskell, a high-level programming language renowned for its strong static typing system, lazy evaluation, and functional programming style. This choice harmonizes with the project's demand for expressive, concise, and reliable code. The Vty library, another significant component, handles terminal I/O, enabling a seamless user interface experience.

Project Structure and Architecture:

The project follows a modular structure where each widget stands independently possessing self-contained features. These widgets interact with each other through an event loop, which is managed by the Brick framework. Developers can customize widgets and the event-handling mechanism to create a UI layout that best suits their application methodologies.