brick is a Haskell terminal user interface (TUI) programming toolkit. To use it, you write a pure function that describes how your user interface should be drawn based on your current application state and you provide a state transformation function to handle events.

brick exposes a declarative API. Unlike most GUI toolkits which require you to write a long and tedious sequence of widget creations and layout setup, brick just requires you to describe your interface using a set of declarative layout combinators. Event-handling is done by pattern-matching on incoming events and updating your application state.

Under the hood, this library builds upon vty, so some knowledge of Vty will be necessary to use this library. Brick depends on vty-crossplatform, so Brick should work anywhere Vty works (Unix and Windows). Brick releases prior to 2.0 only support Unix-based systems.

Example

Here's an example interface (see programs/ReadmeDemo.hs):

joinBorders $
withBorderStyle unicode $
borderWithLabel (str "Hello!") $
(center (str "Left") <+> vBorder <+> center (str "Right"))

Result:

┌─────────Hello!─────────┐
│           │            │
│           │            │
│   Left    │   Right    │
│           │            │
│           │            │
└───────────┴────────────┘

Featured Projects

To get an idea of what some people have done with brick, check out these projects. If you have made something and would like me to include it, get in touch!

| Project | Description | | ------- | ----------- | | 2048Haskell | An implementation of the 2048 game | | babel-cards | A TUI spaced-repetition memorization tool. Similar to Anki. | | bhoogle | A Hoogle client | | bollama | A simple Ollama TUI | | brewsage | A TUI for Homebrew | | brick-trading-journal | A TUI program that calculates basic statistics from trades | | Brickudoku | A hybrid of Tetris and Sudoku | | cbookview | A TUI for exploring polyglot chess opening book files | | clifm | A file manager | | codenames-haskell | An implementation of the Codenames game | | fifteen | An implementation of the 15 puzzle | | ghcup | A TUI for ghcup, the Haskell toolchain manager | | git-brunch | A git branch checkout utility | | Giter | A UI wrapper around Git CLI inspired by Magit. | | gotta-go-fast | A typing tutor | | haradict | A TUI Arabic dictionary powered by ElixirFM | | hascard | A program for reviewing "flash card" notes | | haskell-player | An afplay frontend | | herms | A command-line tool for managing kitchen recipes | | hic-hac-hoe | Play tic tac toe in terminal! | | hledger-iadd | An interactive terminal UI for adding hledger journal entries | | hledger-ui | A terminal UI for the hledger accounting system. | | homodoro | A terminal application to use the pomodoro technique and keep track of daily tasks | | hskanban | A Kanban organizer | | htyper | A typing speed test program | | hyahtzee2 | Famous Yahtzee dice game | | kpxhs | An interactive Keepass database viewer | | matterhorn | A client for Mattermost | | maze | A Brick-based maze game | | monad-torrent | A simple and minimal torrent client | | monalog | Terminal logs observer | | mushu | An MPD client | | mywork [Hackage] | A tool to keep track of the projects you are working on | | pboy | A tiny PDF organizer | | purebred | A mail user agent | | sandwich | A test framework with a TUI interface | | silly-joy | An interpreter for Joy | | solitaire | The card game | | sudoku-tui | A Sudoku implementation | | summoner-tui | An interactive frontend to the Summoner tool | | swarm | A 2D programming and resource gathering game | | tart | A mouse-driven ASCII art drawing program | | tick-tock-tui | A stylish TUI app to handle Bitcoin data provided by Mempool REST API incl. blocks, fees and price converter. | | tetris | An implementation of the Tetris game | | thock | A modern TUI typing game featuring online racing against friends | | timeloop | A time-travelling demonstrator | | towerHanoi | Animated solutions to The Tower of Hanoi | | ttyme | A TUI for Harvest | | ullekha | An interactive terminal notes/todo app with file/redis persistence | | viewprof | A GHC profile viewer | | VOIDSPACE | A space-themed typing-tutor game | | wordle | An implementation of the Wordle game | | wrapping-editor | An embeddable editor with support for Brick | | youbrick | A feed aggregator and launcher for Youtube channels |

These additional packages also extend brick:

| Project | Description | Hackage | | ------- | ----------- | ------- | | brick-filetree | A widget for exploring a directory tree and selecting or flagging files and directories | Hackage | | brick-panes | A Brick overlay library providing composition and isolation of screen areas for TUI apps. | Hackage | | brick-calendar | A library providing a calendar widget for Brick-based applications. | Hackage | | brick-skylighting | A library providing integration support for Skylighting-based syntax highlighting. | Hackage |

Getting Started

Check out the many demo programs to get a feel for different aspects of the library:

$ cabal new-build -f demos
$ find dist-newstyle -type f -name \*-demo

To get started, see the user guide.

Documentation

Documentation for brick comes in a variety of forms:

Feature Overview

brick comes with a bunch of batteries included:

Vertical and horizontal box layout widgets
Basic single- and multi-line text editor widgets
List and table widgets
Progress bar widget
Simple dialog box widget
Border-drawing widgets (put borders around or in between things)
Animation support
Generic scrollable viewports and viewport scroll bars
General-purpose layout control combinators
Extensible widget-building API
User-customizable attribute themes
Type-safe, validated input form API (see the Brick.Forms module)
A filesystem browser for file and directory selection
Borders can be configured to automatically connect!

Brick Discussion

There are two forums for discussing brick-related things:

The Discussions page on the github repo, and
The brick-users Google Group / e-mail list. You can subscribe [here](

Brick

Install / Use

README