The fun, functional and stateful way to build terminal apps. A Go framework based on The Elm Architecture. Bubble Tea is well-suited for simple and complex terminal applications, either inline, full-window, or a mix of both.
Bubble Tea is in use in production and includes a number of features and performance optimizations we’ve added along the way. Among those is a standard framerate-based renderer, a renderer for high-performance scrollable regions which works alongside the main renderer, and mouse support.
To get started, see the tutorial below, the examples, the docs and some common resources.
Be sure to check out Bubbles, a library of common UI components for Bubble Tea.
Bubble Tea is based on the functional design paradigms of The Elm Architecture. It might not seem very Go-like at first, but once you get used to the general structure you'll find that most of the idomatic Go things you know and love are still relevant and useful here.
By the way, the non-annotated source code for this program is also available.
This tutorial assumes you have a working knowledge of Go.
For this tutorial we're making a to-do list.
We'll start by defining our package and import some libraries. Our only external
import will be the Bubble Tea library, which we'll call tea
for short.
package main
import (
"fmt"
"os"
tea "github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea"
)
Bubble Tea programs are comprised of a model that describes the application state and three simple functions that are centered around that model:
- Initialize, a function that returns the model's initial state.
- Update, a function that handles incoming events and updates the model accordingly.
- View, a function that renders the UI based on the data in the model.
So let's start by defining our model which will store our application's state.
It can be any type, but a struct
usually makes the most sense.
type model struct {
choices []string // items on the to-do list
cursor int // which to-do list item our cursor is pointing at
selected map[int]struct{} // which to-do items are selected
}
Next we'll define a function that will initialize our application. An
initialize function returns a model representing our application's initial
state, as well as a Cmd
that could perform some initial I/O. For now, we
don't need to do any I/O, so for the command we'll just return nil
, which
translates to "no command."
func initialize() (tea.Model, tea.Cmd) {
m := model{
// Our to-do list is just a grocery list
choices: []string{"Buy carrots", "Buy celery", "Buy kohlrabi"},
// A map which indicates which choices are selected. We're using
// the map like a mathematical set. The keys refer to the indexes
// of the `choices` slice, above.
selected: make(map[int]struct{}),
}
// Return the model and `nil`, which means "no I/O right now, please."
return m, nil
}
Next we'll define the update function. The update function is called when
"things happen." Its job is to look at what has happened and return an updated
model in response to whatever happened. It can also return a Cmd
and make
more things happen, but for now don't worry about that part.
In our case, when a user presses the down arrow, update
's job is to notice
that the down arrow was pressed and move the cursor accordingly (or not).
The "something happened" comes in the form of a Msg
, which can be any type.
Messages are the result of some I/O that took place, such as a keypress, timer
tick, or a response from a server.
We usually figure out which type of Msg
we received with a type switch, but
you could also use a type assertion.
For now, we'll just deal with tea.KeyMsg
messages, which are automatically
sent to the update function when keys are pressed.
func update(msg tea.Msg, mdl tea.Model) (tea.Model, tea.Cmd) {
m, _ := mdl.(model)
switch msg := msg.(type) {
// Is it a key press?
case tea.KeyMsg:
// Cool, what was the actual key pressed?
switch msg.String() {
// These keys should exit the program.
case "ctrl+c", "q":
return m, tea.Quit
// The "up" and "k" keys move the cursor up
case "up", "k":
if m.cursor > 0 {
m.cursor--
}
// The "down" and "j" keys move the cursor down
case "down", "j":
if m.cursor < len(m.choices)-1 {
m.cursor++
}
// The "enter" key and the spacebar (a literal space) toggle
// the selected state for the item that the cursor is pointing at.
case "enter", " ":
_, ok := m.selected[m.cursor]
if ok {
delete(m.selected, m.cursor)
} else {
m.selected[m.cursor] = struct{}{}
}
}
}
// Return the updated model to the Bubble Tea runtime for processing.
// Note that we're not returning a command.
return m, nil
}
You may have noticed that "ctrl+c" and "q" above return a tea.Quit
command
with the model. That's a special command which instructs the Bubble Tea runtime
to quit, exiting the program.
At last, it's time to render our UI. Of all the functions, the view is the
simplest. A model, in it's current state, comes in and a string
comes out.
That string is our UI!
Because the view describes the entire UI of your application, you don't have to worry about redraw logic and stuff like that. Bubble Tea takes care of it for you.
func view(mdl tea.Model) string {
m, _ := mdl.(model)
// The header
s := "What should we buy at the market?\n\n"
// Iterate over our choices
for i, choice := range m.choices {
// Is the cursor pointing at this choice?
cursor := " " // no cursor
if m.cursor == i {
cursor = ">" // cursor!
}
// Is this choice selected?
checked := " " // not selected
if _, ok := m.selected[i]; ok {
checked = "x" // selected!
}
// Render the row
s += fmt.Sprintf("%s [%s] %s\n", cursor, checked, choice)
}
// The footer
s += "\nPress q to quit.\n"
// Send the UI for rendering
return s
}
The last step is to simply run our program. We pass our functions to
tea.NewProgram
and let it rip:
func main() {
p := tea.NewProgram(initialize, update, view)
if err := p.Start(); err != nil {
fmt.Printf("Alas, there's been an error: %v", err)
os.Exit(1)
}
}
This tutorial covers the basics of building an interactive terminal UI, but in the real world you'll also need to perform I/O. To learn about that have a look at the Command Tutorial. It's pretty simple.
There are also several Bubble Tea examples available and, of course, there are Go Docs.
For some Bubble Tea programs in production, see:
- Glow: a markdown reader, browser and online markdown stash
- The Charm Tool: the Charm user account manager
- Bubbles: various Bubble Tea components
- Termenv: Advanced ANSI styling for terminal applications
- Reflow: ANSI-aware methods for formatting blocks of text and measuring widths of strings. Many runes, such as East Asian charcters and emojis, are two cells wide, so measuring a layout with
len()
often won't cut it. Reflow is particularly nice for this as it measures character widths while ignoring any ANSI sequences present.
Bubble Tea is based on the paradigms of The Elm Architecture by Evan Czaplicki et alia and the excellent go-tea by TJ Holowaychuk.
A Charm project.
Charm喜爱开源软件!