NAME
Tickit - Terminal Interface Construction KIT
SYNOPSIS
use Tickit;
use Tickit::Widget::Box;
use Tickit::Widget::Static;
my $tickit = Tickit->new;
my $box = Tickit::Widget::Box->new(
h_border => 4,
v_border => 2,
bg => "green",
child => Tickit::Widget::Static->new(
text => "Hello, world!",
bg => "black",
align => "centre",
valign => "middle",
),
);
$tickit->set_root_widget( $box );
$tickit->run;DESCRIPTION
Tickit is a high-level toolkit for creating full-screen terminal-based interactive programs. It allows programs to be written in an abstracted way, working with a tree of widget objects, to represent the layout of the interface and implement its behaviours.
Its supported terminal features includes a rich set of rendering attributes (bold, underline, italic, 256-colours, etc), support for mouse including wheel and position events above the 224th column and arbitrary modified key input via libtermkey (all of these will require a supporting terminal as well). It also supports having multiple instances and non-blocking or asynchronous control.
At the current version, this is a Perl distribution which contains some XS utility code, and depends on a number of other XS modules to provide the remaining terminal behaviours. Work is in progress at porting the lower level parts into a standalone C library, with the intention being that eventually this distribution will become an XS wrapper for that C library. Development releases may appear on CPAN that include the C library and XS wrappings of it.
CONSTRUCTOR
$tickit = Tickit->new( %args )
Constructs a new Tickit framework container object.
Takes the following named arguments at construction time:
- term_in => IO
-
IO handle for terminal input. Will default to
STDIN. - term_out => IO
-
IO handle for terminal output. Will default to
STDOUT. - UTF8 => BOOL
-
If defined, overrides locale detection to enable or disable UTF-8 mode. If not defined then this will be detected from the locale by using Perl's
${^UTF8LOCALE}variable.
METHODS
$tickit->later( $code )
Runs the given CODE reference at some time soon in the future. It will not be invoked yet, but will be invoked at some point before the next round of input events are processed.
$term = $tickit->term
Returns the underlying Tickit::Term object.
$cols = $tickit->cols
$lines = $tickit->lines
Query the current size of the terminal. Will be cached and updated on receipt of SIGWINCH signals.
$tickit->bind_key( $key, $code )
Installs a callback to invoke if the given key is pressed, overwriting any previous callback for the same key. The code block is invoked as
$code->( $tickit, $key )If $code is missing or undef, any existing callback is removed.
As a convenience for the common application use case, the Ctrl-C key is bound to the stop method.
To remove this binding, simply bind another callback, or remove the binding entirely by setting undef.
$tickit->rootwin
Returns the root Tickit::Window.
$tickit->set_root_widget( $widget )
Sets the root widget for the application's display. This must be a subclass of Tickit::Widget.
$tickit->setup_term
Set up the screen and generally prepare to start running
$tickit->teardown_term
Shut down the screen after running
$tickit->tick
Run a single round of IO events. Does not call setup_term or teardown_term.
$tickit->run
Calls the setup_term method, then processes IO events until stopped, by the stop method, SIGINT, SIGTERM or the Ctrl-C key. Then runs the teardown_term method, and returns.
$tickit->stop
Causes a currently-running run method to stop processing events and return.
AUTHOR
Paul Evans <leonerd@leonerd.org.uk>