What's the best way to get text user-interfaces (ncurses-like) functionality in Java?

java ncurses tui
Anthony picture Anthony · Aug 24, 2009 · Viewed 28.6k times · Source

I need to implement a console application (possibly in Java) with ncurses-like functionality (such as navigating a menu and redrawing the whole screen).

The only solutions that I can find to do this so far are CHARVA ("A Java Windowing Toolkit for Text Terminals"), tuipeer ("A Text User Interface for the Java AWT") and a really old Dr. Dobb's article ("A Text UI for the Java AWT ").

So far, CHARVA is the best thing that I can find but I don't like the idea of it using JNI to wrap curses.

Is there any standard way, say with AWT/Swing, to do do this? What other alternatives are there?

Answer

Waldemar Wosiński picture Waldemar Wosiński · Dec 18, 2012

Since 2010 there is Lanterna :

Lanterna is a Java library allowing you to write easy semi-graphical user interfaces in a text-only environment, very similar to the C library curses but with more functionality. Lanterna is supporting xterm compatible terminals and terminal emulators such as konsole, gnome-terminal, putty, xterm and many more. One of the main benefits of lanterna is that it's not dependent on any native library but runs 100% in pure Java.

More here: https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna

Related questions

How do I convert a String to an int in Java?

How can I convert a String to an int in Java? My String contains only numbers, and I want to return the number it represents. For example, given the string "1234" the result should be the number 1234.

Read More
How do I declare and initialize an array in Java?

How do I declare and initialize an array in Java?

Read More
How do I generate random integers within a specific range in Java?

How do I generate a random int value in a specific range? I have tried the following, but those do not work: Attempt 1: randomNum = minimum + (int)(Math.random() * maximum); // Bug: `randomNum` can be bigger than `maximum`. Attempt 2: Random rn = new …

Read More