TermUi - a direct mode terminal user interface framework with components

A direct-mode Terminal UI framework for Elixir/BEAM, inspired by BubbleTea (Go) and Ratatui (Rust).

TermUI leverages BEAM’s unique strengths—fault tolerance, actor model, hot code reloading—to build robust terminal applications using The Elm Architecture.

Blue Theme Yellow Theme

Features

  • Elm Architecture - Predictable state management with init/update/view

  • Rich Widget Library - Gauges, tables, menus, charts, dialogs, and more

  • Efficient Rendering - Double-buffered differential updates at 60 FPS

  • Themable - True color RGB support (16 million colors)

  • Cross-Platform - Linux, macOS, Windows 10+ terminal support

  • OTP Integration - Supervision trees, fault tolerance, hot code reload

Installation

Add term_ui to your dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:term_ui, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end
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I tried the dashboard example and the refresh did not update the view. Would that be caused by

because the state diff is the same?

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Yes unfortunately (or fortunately) you cant see the refresh. The rendering process uses two ETS buffers and only render a diff of the previous buffer and the next. I actually spent time trying to figure out why the refresh did not work haha

Note: you can see the past refresh by changing the theme.

2 Likes

I was able to run all of your examples - no problems. Xubuntu 24.04, Ghostty, Elixir 1.19.3, Erlang 28.2.

(yeah the refresh on the dashboard was funky for me too…)

This looks like great work BRAVO.

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Looks very good :+1:

This looks nice and clean!

Yeah looked like a good idea to have a refresh on the dashboard for some reason. I was not expectint to be useless haha. Glad that it all worked, you never know when you publish.

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Thanks, there are more widgets I want to do and hopefully people can just contribute theirs.
I am considering adding a DSL or some templating sigil maybe.

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this looks very nice. I had some monitoring for some legacy systems that is using scripting like tail/sed and grep to alert people about issues based on logs. I wonder if the same can be done using it "time to explore”.

You could probably easily transform your scripts to .exs and run them from inside the TUI. I could definitetly see an email library tied into it even. Its elixir so sky is the limit. If you ever make an interesting widget for it, share it back if you can.


TermUI v0.2.0

New Widgets

Basic Widgets:

  • TextInput - Single-line and multi-line text input with cursor movement

Overlay Widgets:

  • AlertDialog - Modal dialog for confirmations with standard button configurations
  • ContextMenu - Right-click context menu with keyboard and mouse support

Layout Widgets:

  • Viewport - Scrollable view with keyboard and mouse support
  • SplitPane - Resizable multi-pane layouts for IDE-style interfaces
  • TreeView - Hierarchical data display with expand/collapse

Input Widgets:

  • FormBuilder - Structured forms with validation and multiple field types
  • CommandPalette - VS Code-style command discovery with fuzzy search

Visualization Widgets:

  • BarChart - Horizontal/vertical bar charts for categorical data
  • LineChart - Line charts using Braille characters for sub-character resolution
  • Canvas - Direct drawing surface for custom visualizations

Data Streaming Widgets:

  • LogViewer - High-performance log viewer with virtual scrolling and filtering
  • StreamWidget - GenStage-integrated widget with backpressure support

BEAM Introspection Widgets:

  • ProcessMonitor - Live BEAM process inspection with sorting and filtering
  • SupervisionTreeViewer - OTP supervision hierarchy visualization
  • ClusterDashboard - Distributed Erlang cluster monitoring

Other Changes

  • Added usage_rules for AI assistant integration - see usage_rules | Hex
  • Added README documentation for all 25 example directories
  • Fixed mouse tracking cleanup on application exit
  • Fixed ToastManager rendering
  • Improved ContextMenu mouse support and hover highlighting
  • Various bug fixes and documentation improvements
8 Likes