brick

A declarative terminal user interface library

https://github.com/jtdaugherty/brick/

Version on this page:0.62
LTS Haskell 22.43:2.1.1
Stackage Nightly 2024-12-04:2.4
Latest on Hackage:2.6

See all snapshots brick appears in

BSD-3-Clause licensed and maintained by Jonathan Daugherty
This version can be pinned in stack with:brick-0.62@sha256:363238020d598abb08182b8a0a910f48d1517955611f416bb6bb8645c7e80ee8,16531

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 look 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 “create a widget, now bind an event handler”, brick just requires you to describe your interface using a set of declarative layout combinators.

Under the hood, this library builds upon vty, so some knowledge of Vty will be helpful in using this library.

Example

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

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, take a look at these projects. If you have made something and would like me to include it, get in touch!

Project Description
tetris An implementation of the Tetris game
gotta-go-fast A typing tutor
haskell-player An afplay frontend
mushu An MPD client
matterhorn A client for Mattermost
viewprof A GHC profile viewer
tart A mouse-driven ASCII art drawing program
silly-joy An interpreter for Joy
herms A command-line tool for managing kitchen recipes
purebred A mail user agent
2048Haskell An implementation of the 2048 game
bhoogle A Hoogle client
clifm A file manager
towerHanoi Animated solutions to The Tower of Hanoi
VOIDSPACE A space-themed typing-tutor game
solitaire The card game
sudoku-tui A Sudoku implementation
summoner-tui An interactive frontend to the Summoner tool
wrapping-editor An embeddable editor with support for Brick
git-brunch A git branch checkout utility
hascard A program for reviewing “flash card” notes
ttyme A TUI for Harvest
ghcup A TUI for ghcup, the Haskell toolchain manager
cbookview A TUI for exploring polyglot chess opening book files
thock A modern TUI typing game featuring online racing against friends
fifteen An implementation of the 15 puzzle
maze A Brick-based maze game
pboy A tiny PDF organizer
hyahtzee2 Famous Yahtzee dice game

These third-party packages also extend brick:

Project Description
brick-filetree [Hackage] A widget for exploring a directory tree and selecting or flagging files and directories

Release Announcements / News

Find out about brick releases and other news on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/brick_haskell/

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 widget
  • Progress bar widget
  • Simple dialog box widget
  • Border-drawing widgets (put borders around or in between things)
  • Generic scrollable viewports
  • 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-Users Discussion

The brick-users Google Group / e-mail list is a place to discuss library changes, give feedback, and ask questions. You can subscribe at:

https://groups.google.com/group/brick-users

Status

There are some places were I have deliberately chosen to worry about performance later for the sake of spending more time on the design (and to wait on performance issues to arise first). brick is also something of an experimental project of mine and some aspects of the design involve trade-offs that might not be right for your application. Brick is not intended to be all things to all people; rather, I want it to provide a good foundation for building complex terminal interfaces in a declarative style to take away specific headaches of building, modifying, and working with such interfaces, all while seeing how far we can get with a pure function to specify the interface.

brick exports an extension API that makes it possible to make your own packages and widgets. If you use that, you’ll also be helping to test whether the exported interface is usable and complete!

Reporting bugs

Please file bug reports as GitHub issues. For best results:

  • Include the versions of relevant software packages: your terminal emulator, brick, ghc, and vty will be the most important ones.

  • Clearly describe the behavior you expected …

  • … and include a minimal demonstration program that exhibits the behavior you actually observed.

Contributing

If you decide to contribute, that’s great! Here are some guidelines you should consider to make submitting patches easier for all concerned:

  • If you want to take on big things, talk to me first; let’s have a design/vision discussion before you start coding. Create a GitHub issue and we can use that as the place to hash things out.
  • Please make changes consistent with the conventions I’ve used in the codebase.
  • Please adjust or provide Haddock and/or user guide documentation relevant to any changes you make.
  • New commits should be -Wall clean.
  • Please do NOT include package version changes in your patches. Package version changes are only done at release time when the full scope of a release’s changes can be evaluated to determine the appropriate version change.

Changes

Brick changelog

0.62

API changes:

  • Brick.Widgets.Core got new functions crop{Left,Right,Bottom,Top}To. Unlike the crop...By functions, which crop on the specified side by a particular amount, these crop...To functions crop on the specified side and take a desired overall width of the final result and use that to determine how much to crop. A widget x of width w could thus be cropped equivalently with cropLeftBy a x and cropLeftTo (w - a) x.

Other changes:

  • Added programs/CroppingDemo.hs to demonstrate the new (and preexisting) cropping functions.

0.61

API changes:

  • Brick.Forms got editShowableFieldWithValidate, a generalization of editShowableField that allows the caller to specify an additional validation function (thanks Ben Selfridge)

0.60.2

Bug fixes:

  • Widgets reported as clickable are now reported as clickable even when their renderings are cached with cached (#307; thanks Hari Menon)

0.60.1

Bug fixes:

  • table [] no longer raises TEUnequalRowSizes.

0.60

New features:

  • Added Brick.Widgets.Table to support drawing basic tables. See programs/TableDemo.hs for a demonstration (cabal new-run -f demos brick-table-demo).

0.59

API changes:

  • Brick.Widgets.List got listMoveToBeginning and listMoveToEnd functions
  • Extent: removed the unused extentOffset field

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed a crash in the border rewriting code that attempted to rewrite empty images (#305) (thanks @dmwit)

0.58.1

Bug fixes:

  • Removed a defunct failing test from the List test suite

0.58

Package changes:

  • Updated dependency constraints to build on GHC 9.0.1 (thanks Ondřej Súkup)

API changes:

  • The FileBrowser module now exports individual functions for each of the events that it handles. This allows end users to trigger the behaviors directly rather than relying on the built-in handleFileBrowserEvent function. The documentation has been updated to indicate which functions are triggered by each key event. (Thanks David B. Lamkins)

Other changes:

  • The List module’s listFindBy function now attempts to find a match anywhere in the list rather than just somewhere between the cursor and the end of the list.
  • The FileBrowser now positions a cursor at the beginning of the selected entry when the file browser is focused. (thanks Mario Lang)
  • The user guide’s viewport visibility example got an important syntactic fix. (thanks Mario Lang)

0.57.1

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed a small space leak in the main rendering loop (#260)
  • Get TailDemo building on more versions of GHC

0.57

Package changes:

  • Raised lower bound on vty to 5.31 to get the new strikethrough style.

New features:

  • Added support for the strikethrough style in Brick theme customization files.

0.56

Package changes:

  • Increased upper bound for base to support GHC 8.10.2 (thanks Ryan Scott)

API changes:

  • Added Brick.Forms.updateFormState to update the state contained within (and managed by) a Form. This function takes care of the details of updating the form fields themselves to be consistent with the change in underlying state.
  • Added the overall window width (windowWidth) and height (windowHeight) to Context, the rendering context type (thanks Tom McLaughlin)

Other changes:

  • Added brick-tail-demo, a demonstration program for writing a tail-style output-following interface.
  • Updated Brick.Widgets.ProgressBar so that it handles near-endpoint cases more naturally (fixes #281)

0.55

Package changes:

  • Increased lower bound on vty dependency to 5.29.

Bug fixes:

  • customMain now restores the initial terminal input state on shutdown. This means that changes to the input state flags in the last suspendAndResume before program exit are no longer propagated to the end user’s terminal environment (which could lead to broken or garbled terminal I/O).

0.54

API changes:

  • Exported Brick.Widgets.FileBrowser.maybeSelectCurrentEntry (thanks Róman Joost)

Other changes:

  • Added handlers for the Home and End keys to Brick.Widgets.Edit.handleEditorEvent (thanks Róman Joost)

0.53

Package changes:

  • Relaxed base bounds to allow building with GHC 8.10 (thanks Joshua Chia)

Bug fixes:

  • vLimitPercent: use correct horizontal size policy from child (thanks Janek Spaderna)
  • str: be more aggressive in determining how many characters to display (attempt to display as many zero-width characters as possible)

0.52.1

Bug fixes:

  • Attribute map lookups now merge styles in addition to merging colors (see eb857e6bb176e119ac76f5e2af475f1b49812088).
  • txtWrapWith now pads in the single-line case (see also 926d317c46b19d4e576748891a1702080287aa03, #234, and #263)

0.52

API changes:

  • EventM now provides a MonadFail instance
  • EventM now provides MonadMask, MonadCatch, and MonadThrow instances (thanks Fraser Tweedale)

Other changes:

  • The FileBrowser now has support for vi-style bindings in addition to its previous bindings. New bindings include:
    • j/k: next/previous element
    • C-n/C-p: page down/up
    • C-d/C-u: half page down/up
    • g: select first entry
    • G: select last entry

0.51

API changes:

  • Added Brick.Focus.focusRingToList, which returns all of the elements in a focus ring as a list, starting with the focused entry and wrapping around (#257; thanks @4eUeP)

Bug fixes:

  • Fix Brick.Widgets.FileBrowser.fileExtensionMatch to match directories and also match symlinks that link to directories (thanks @YVee1)

Other changes:

  • Added demonstration program screenshot gallery (thanks @drola)

0.50.1

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed a bug where a self-referential symlink would cause the file browser to get into a loop and ultimately crash. (Thanks Kevin Quick)

API changes:

  • Added Brick.Focus.focusRingLength to get the size of a focus ring. (Thanks Róman Joost)

Other changes:

  • Updated Travis configuration and base dependency to support GHC 8.8.1. (thanks Brandon Hamilton)

0.50

API changes:

  • Added writeBChanNonBlocking, which does a non-blocking write to a BChan and returns whether the write succeeded. This required raising the STM lower bound to 2.4.3.

0.49

New features:

  • The FileBrowser now supports navigation of directories via symlinks, so Enter on a symlink will descend into the target path of the symlink if that path is a directory. Part of this change is that the FileInfo type got a new file, fileInfoLinkTargetType, that indicates the type of file that the link points to, if any.

0.48

New features:

  • The Edit widget now supports EvPaste Vty events by default, assuming UTF-8 encoding of pasted bytes. If pasted bytes are not UTF-8-decodable, the pastes will be ignored. In any case, users can still intercept EvPaste events as before and handle them as desired if the default behavior is not desirable.

Other changes:

  • txtWrapWith now always pads its output to the available width to obey its Greedy requirement.

0.47.1

Bug fixes:

  • userguide: update stale Result construction
  • Added test case for List initial selection (thanks Fraser Tweedale)
  • Fixed build on GHC 7.10 due to RULES pragma formatting issue (thanks Fraser Tweedale)
  • Various CI-related fixes (thanks Fraser Tweedale)

0.47

API changes:

  • Changed Brick.Main.customMain so that it now takes an additional (first) argument: the initial Vty handle to use. This lets the caller have more control over the terminal state when, for example, they have previously set up Vty to do other work before calling customMain.
  • Added Brick.Main.customMainWithVty. This function is the same as customMain except that it also returns the final Vty handle that it used internally without shutting that Vty handle down. This allows the caller to continue using the terminal without resetting it after customMainWithVty finishes executing.

0.46

Performance improvements:

  • The box combinators <=>, <+>, vBox, and hBox got GHC rewrite rules that will optimize away redundant boxes. This change improves performance for chains of <+> or <=> as well as nested boxes using hBox and vBox. Previously chains of e.g. <+> produced binary trees of boxes that incurred more rendering overhead. Those are now optimized away.

API changes:

  • Data.Text.Markup: renamed empty to isEmpty

0.45

API changes:

  • List got a new listFindBy function (thanks Fraser Tweedale). This function uses a predicate to find a matching element in the list and move the cursor to that item.
  • Data.Text.Markup got a new empty function (#213)

0.44.1

Bug fixes:

  • Brick.Markup now properly renders empty lines in markup (#209)

0.44

API changes:

  • The List type got its container type generalized thanks to a lot of work by Fraser Tweedale. Note that this change is backwards-compatible with older Brick programs that use the List. Thanks to this work, the List now supports both Data.Vector and Data.Sequence as its container types out of the box and can be extended to support other sequence types with some simple type class instances. In addition, property tests are provided for List and its asymptotics are noted in the documentation. Along the way, various bugs in some of the list movement functions got fixed to bring them in line with the advertised behavior in the documentation. Thanks, Fraser!

0.43

API changes:

  • The FileBrowser module got the ability to select multiple files (#204). This means that the fileBrowserSelection function now returns a list of FileInfo rather than at most one via Maybe. The module also now uses a new attribute, fileBrowserSelectedAttr, to indicate entries that are currently selected (in addition to displaying an asterisk after their filenames). Lastly, the file size and type fields of FileInfo have been replaced with a new type, FileStatus, and FileInfo now carries an Either IOException FileStatus. As part of that safety improvement, setWorkingDirectory now no longer clobbers the entire entry listing if any of the listings fail to stat. In addition, the FileBrowser now uses the correct file stat routines to deal with symbolic links.

Package changes:

  • Added lower bound on directory (thanks Fraser Tweedale)

Test suite changes:

  • Test suite now propagates success/failure to exit status (thanks Fraser Tweedale)

0.42.1

Behavior changes:

  • File browsers in search mode now terminate search mode when Enter is pressed, resulting in better behavior.

0.42

New features:

  • Added Brick.Widgets.FileBrowser, which provides a filesystem browser for selecting files and directories. Read the Haddock module documentation and see the included demo program, programs/FileBrowserDemo.hs, for information on using the new functionality.

0.41.5

Miscellaneous:

  • suspendAndResume now empties the rendering cache when returning to the rendering event loop. This ensures that the state returned by the IO action is rendered completely rather than relying on potentially stale cache entries.

0.41.4

API changes:

  • Forms: added setFormFocus function to set focus for a form
  • Added NFData instances for AttrMap and Theme types (thanks Fraser Tweedale)

0.41.3

Bug fixes:

  • Lists now draw correctly without crashing due to a vector slice bounds check failure if their rendering area is too small (#195; thanks @andrevdm)

Other changes:

  • Relaxed base bounds to support GHC 8.6 (thanks @maoe)
  • Added towerHanoi to the featured projects list

0.41.2

Bug fixes:

  • Support STM 2.5 by allowing for Natural argument to newTBQueue (thanks @osa1)

0.41.1

New features:

  • Forms: added checkboxCustomField and radioCustomField to permit customization of characters used to draw selection state for such fields.

0.41

New features:

  • Brick.Forms got a new field constructor, listField, that provides a form field using a List.
  • List: added the listMoveToElement function for changing the list selection to the specified element, if it exists.

Package changes:

  • Now depends on vty >= 5.24.

Other changes:

  • viewport: fixed failable patterns for forward compatibility with GHC 8.6 (#183)
  • Add Generic, NFData, and Read instances for some types

0.40

New features:

  • Brick.Widgets.Core: added new functions hLimitPercent and vLimitPercent. These behave similarly to hLimit and vLimit except that instead of taking absolute numbers of columns or rows, they take percentages. (Thanks Roman Joost)

0.39

New features:

  • The italic keyword is now supported in theme customization file style lists. This requires vty >= 5.23.1

0.38

New features:

  • Added support for parsing #RRGGBB color values in theme customization files in addition to the color names already supported (thanks Brent Carmer). These values are mapped to the nearest reasonable entry in the 240-color space.

0.37.2

Bug fixes:

  • Theme customization files can now use empty lists for style customization.

0.37.1

API changes:

  • Exposed Brick.Forms.renderFormFieldState.

0.37

Behavior changes:

  • listMoveBy now automatically moves to the first or last position in the list if called when the list is non-empty but has no selected element (thanks Philip Kamenarsky)

API changes:

  • Added Brick.Widgets.List.renderListWithIndex that passes the index of each element to the item rendering function (thanks [email protected])

0.36.3

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed a bug where mouse-up events in viewports were not translated into the global coordinate space, unlike mouse-down events (#173)

0.36.2

API changes:

  • The Forms API got two new functions, setFormConcat and setFieldConcat, used for controlling the previously hard-coded concatenation behavior of form fields. These are optional and both concatentation settings default to their former hard-coded values, vBox (#172).

0.36.1

Package changes:

  • Raiseed upper bound to support GHC 8.4.2 (#171)

Other changes:

  • Improved List accessor documentation (thanks liam [email protected])
  • Brick.Main now uses a Set instead a list to track invalidation requests to avoid duplicates.

0.36

New features:

  • Dynamic border support: adjacent widgets that use borders can make those borders seamlessly connect to each other! Thanks so much to Daniel Wagner for this feature! Please see programs/DynamicBorderDemo.hs for a demonstraton. Also see the “Joinable Borders” section of the User Guide.

0.35.1

  • Conditionally depend on semigroups for GHC before 8

0.35

  • Added support for GHC 8.4.
  • Updated travis build to test on all 8.x releases (thanks Peter Simons)

0.34.1

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed a bug where the “reverseVideo” style could not be parsed in a theme customization when it was all lowercase (thanks Yuriy Lazarev)

Documentation changes:

  • Guide: added more complete example of creating a default theme (thanks Mark Wales)
  • Guide: added offset to Extent pattern matching (thanks Mark Wales)

0.34

API changes:

  • Core: vLimit and hLimit now bound sizes rather than setting them. This was the original intention of these combinators. The change in behavior means that now vLimit N means that at most N rows will be available; if the context has less, then the smaller constraint in the context is used instead. Programs affected by this behavior will be those that assume that vLimit doesn’t do this, but that should be very few or zero.

Other changes:

  • Dialog: now arrow keys no longer wrap around available buttons but stop at rightmost or leftmost button to avoid confusion when attempting to tell which button is selected in two-button dialogs (thanks to Karl Ostmo for this change)

Documentation changes:

  • Updated Haddocks for str/txt in Core to mention tab character considerations

0.33

API changes:

  • Forms: added support for external validation of form fields using setFieldValid. See the Haddock, User Guide, and FormDemo.hs for details.
  • Borders: removed all attribute names except borderAttr to simplify border attribute assignment.

0.32.1

Bug fixes:

  • Core: make all text wrap widgets Greedy horizontally

Miscellaneous:

  • Dialog: clarify purpose in documentation (w.r.t. #149)

0.32

API changes:

  • This release adds the new Brick.Forms module, which provides an API for type-safe input forms with automatic rendering, event handling, and state management! See the Haddock and the “Input Forms” section of the Brick User Guide for information on this killer feature! Many thanks to Kevin Quick for feedback on this new functionality.

0.31

Behavior changes:

  • viewport now implicitly causes generation of mouse events for the viewport when mouse mode is enabled. The mouse events are expressed in the coordinate system of the contents of the viewport. The consequence and intention of this change is to enable mouse event reporting for editors when clicks occur outside the known text area.

0.30

API changes:

  • Brick.Focus: added focusSetCurrent to make it easy to set the focus of a focus ring
  • Brick.Main: added a simple polymorphic App value, simpleApp

0.29.1

Bug fixes:

  • Mixed-case color names like “brightBlue” can now be parsed in theme customization files.

0.29

API changes:

  • Added Ord instances for Location and BrickEvent (thanks Tom Sydney Kerckhove)
  • Brick.AttrMap: attribute name components are now exposed via the attrNameComponents function. Also added a Read instance for AttrName.

New features:

  • This release adds user-customizable theme support. Please see the “Attribute Themes” section of the User Guide for an introduction; see the Haddock documentation for Brick.Themes for full details. Also, see the new programs/ThemeDemo.hs for a working demonstration.

0.28

API changes:

  • Brick.AttrMap.setDefault was renamed to setDefaultAttr.
  • Added Brick.AttrMap.getDefaultAttr: get the default attribute from an attribute map.
  • Added Brick.Widgets.Core.modifyDefAttr to modify the default attribute of the rendering context.

Other changes:

  • Updated AttrDemo to show usage of modifyDefAttr.

0.27

API changes:

  • Brick.Widgets.Core: added hyperlink combinator (thanks Getty Ritter for hyperlinking support)

Other changes:

  • Updated AttrDemo to show how to use hyperlinking
  • README: Added herms to featured projects

0.26.1

  • Fixed haddock for listHandleEventVi.

0.26

API changes:

  • Added Brick.Widgets.List.handleListEventVi to add support for vi-style movements to lists (thanks Richard Alex Hofer)

Other changes:

  • Added ListViDemo.hs to demonstrate the Vi-style handler for lists (thanks Richard Alex Hofer)

0.25

API changes:

  • List: added page movement functions listMoveByPages, listMovePageUp, and listMovePageDown (thanks Richard Alex Hofer)

Miscellaneous:

  • Fixed a spelling mistake in the AttrMap haddock (thanks Edward Betts)

0.24.2

Miscellaneous:

  • Minor documentation updates including a clarification for #135

0.24.1

Bug fixes:

  • vBox/hBox: when there is leftover space and all elements are greedy, spread it amongst the elements as evenly as possible instead of assigning it all to the first element (fixes #133)

Package changes:

  • Include Sam Tay’s brick tutorial files in extra-doc-files

0.24

API changes:

  • Added Brick.Widgets.Core.setAvailableSize to control rendering context size in cases where the screen size is too constraining (e.g. for a floating layer that might be bigger than the screen).

Documentation changes:

  • Samuel Tay has contributed his wonderful Brick tutorial to this package in docs/samtay-tutorial.md. Thank you!

0.23

API changes:

  • getVtyHandle: always return a Vty handle rather than Maybe (Previously, in appStartEvent you’d get Nothing because Vty had not been initialized yet. This made various use cases impossible to satisfy because appStartEvent is a natural place to get initial terminal state from Vty. This change makes it so that a Vty handle is always available, even in appStartEvent.)
  • txtWrapWith: added missing haddock

0.22

API changes:

  • Core: added txtWrapWith and strWrapWith functions to provide control over wrapping behavior by specifying custom wrapping settings.

Other changes:

  • Updated TextWrapDemo.hs to demonstrate customizing wrapping settings.

0.21

Package changes:

  • Upgrade to word-wrap 0.2

Other changes:

  • Brick.Types.Internal: improve mouse constructor haddock
  • Add a basic fill demonstration program (FillDemo.hs)

0.20.1

Bug fixes:

  • str: fixed an IsString constraint confusion on GHC 7.10.1

0.20

Package changes:

  • Added a dependency on “word-wrap” for text-wrapping.
  • Added a new TextWrapDemo demo program to illustrate text wrapping support

API changes:

  • Brick.Widgets.Core: added new functions txtWrap and strWrap to do wrapping of long lines of text.

Miscellaneous:

  • Guide: fixed event type (#126)

0.19

API changes:

  • The editor content drawing function is now passed to renderEditor, not the constructor, to improve separation of presentation and representation concerns. The corresponding Editor drawing function lens and accessor were removed.

0.18

Package changes:

  • Added a dependency on data-clist.

API changes:

  • Brick.Focus: removed the Functor instance for FocusRing.
  • Brick.Focus: re-implemented FocusRing in terms of the circular list data structure from data-clist. In addition, this change introduced “focusRingModify”, which permits the user to use the data-clist API to directly manipulate the FocusRing’s internals. This way brick doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel on the focus ring behavior.

0.17.2

Package changes:

  • Added programs/ReadmeDemo.hs and featured its output and code in the README to provide an early demonstration

Library changes:

  • centerAbout now right- and bottom-pads its operand to behave consistently with h/vCenter

0.17.1

Package changes:

  • Use Extra-Doc-Files instead of Data-Files for documentation files

Bug fixes:

  • List: correctly update selected index in listInsert
  • Update example program in brick.cabal (thanks @timbod7)

0.17

Package changes:

  • Updated to depend on Vty 5.15.
  • Updated to remove dependency on data-default.
  • Discontinued support for GHC versions prior to 7.10.1.

API changes:

  • Removed Data.Default instances for AttrName, AttrMap, Result, and BorderStyle (use Monoid instances instead where possible).
  • Added defaultBorderStyle :: BorderStyle.
  • Added emptyResult :: Result n.

0.16

This release includes a breaking API change:

  • Brick now uses bounded channels (Brick.BChan.BChan) for event communication rather than Control.Concurrent.Chan’s unbounded channels to improve memory consumption for programs with runaway event production (thanks Joshua Chia)

Other API changes:

  • Brick.List got a new function, listModify, for modifying the selected element (thanks @diegospd)

Performance improvements:

  • hBox and vBox now use the more efficient DList data structure when rendering to improve performance for boxes with many elements (thanks Mitsutoshi Aoe)

0.15.2

Bug fixes:

  • viewport: do not cull cursor locations on empty viewport contents (fixes #105)
  • User guide CounterEvent type fix (thanks @diegospd)

0.15.1

Bug fixes:

  • List: fixed empty list validation in listReplace (thanks Joshua Chia)

0.15

Demo changes:

  • MouseDemo: add an editor and use mouse events to move the cursor
  • MouseDemo: Enhance MouseDemo to show interaction between ‘clickable’ and viewports (thanks Kevin Quick)

New features:

  • Editors now report mouse click events

API changes:

  • Rename TerminalLocation row/column fields to avoid commonplace name clashes; rename row/column to locationRow/locationColumn (fixes #96)

Bug fixes:

  • Core: make cropToContext also crop extents (fixes #101)
  • viewport: if the sub-widget is not rendered, also cull all extents and cursor locations

Documentation changes:

  • User Guide updates: minor fixes, updates to content on custom widgets, wide character support, and examples (thanks [email protected], Kevin Quick)

0.14

This release added support for wide characters. In particular, wide characters can now be entered into the text editor widget and used in ‘str’ and ‘txt’ widgets.

0.13

API changes:

  • Mouse mode is no longer enabled by default.
  • customMain’s event channel parameter is now optional
  • FocusRing now provides a Functor instance (thanks Ian Jeffries)

0.12

This release primarily adds support for mouse interaction. For details, see the Mouse Support section of the User Guide. This release also includes breaking API changes for the App type. Here’s a migration guide:

  • Event handlers now take “BrickEvent n e” instead of “e”, where “e” was the custom event type used before this change. To recover your own custom events, pattern-match on “AppEvent”; to recover Vty input events, pattern-match on “VtyEvent”.
  • appLiftVtyEvent went away and can just be removed from your App record constructor.
  • If you aren’t using the custom event type or were just using Vty’s “Event” type as your App’s event type, you can set your event type to just “e” because you’ll now be able to get Vty events regardless of whether you use a custom event type.

API changes:

  • Added the Widget combinator “clickable” to indicate that a widget should generate mouse click events
  • Added the Extent data type and the “reportExtent” widget combinator to report the positions and sizes of widgets
  • Rendering “Result” values now include reported extents and update their offsets (adds “extents” field and “extentsL” lens)
  • Added “lookupExtent”, “findClickedExtents”, and “clickedExtent” in EventM to find extents and check them for mouse clicks
  • Removed appLiftVtyEvent. Instead of wrapping Vty’s events in your own type, you now get a “BrickEvent” that always contains Vty events but has the ability to embed your custom events. See the User Guide for details.
  • Added demo program MouseDemo.hs
  • Added demo program ProgressBarDemo.hs (thanks Kevin Quick)
  • Added mapAttrname, mapAttrNames, and overrideAttr functions (thanks Kevin Quick)
  • Make handleEventLensed polymorphic over event type to allow use with custom events (thanks Kevin Quick)
  • Added Ord constraint to some library startup functions

Bug fixes:

  • Added Show instance for Editor, List (fixes #63)

Documentation changes:

  • Updated documentation to use new “resource name” terminology to reduce confusion and better explain the purpose of names.
  • Updated user guide with sections on mouse support, the rendering cache, resource names, paste mode, and extents

Package changes:

  • Depend on Vty 5.11.3 to get mouse mode support

0.11

API changes:

  • Added getVtyHandle in EventM for obtaining the current Vty context. It returns Nothing when calling the appStartEvent handler but after that a context is always available.

0.10

New features:

  • Added a rendering cache. To use the rendering cache, use the ‘cached’ widget combinator. This causes drawings of the specified widget to re-use a cached rendering until the rendering cache is invalidated with ‘invalidateCacheEntry’ or ‘invalidateCache’. This change also includes programs/CacheDemo.hs. This change introduced an Ord constraint on the name type variable ‘n’.
  • Added setTop and setLeft for setting viewport offsets directly in EventM.
  • Dialog event handlers now support left and right arrow keys (thanks Grégoire Charvet)

Library changes:

  • On resizes brick now draws the application twice before handling the resize event. This change makes it possible for event handlers to get the latest viewport states on a resize rather than getting the most recent (but stale) versions as before, at the cost of a second redraw.

Bug fixes:

  • We now use the most recent rendering state when setting up event handler viewport data. This mostly won’t matter to anyone except in cases where a viewport name was expected to be in the viewport map but wasn’t due to using stale rendering state to set up EventM.

0.9

Package changes:

  • Depend on text-zipper 0.7.1

API changes:

  • The editor widget state value is now polymorphic over the type of “string” value that can be edited, so you can now create editors over Text values as well as Strings. This is a breaking change but it only requires the addition of the string type variable to any uses of Editor. (thanks Jason Dagit and Getty Ritter)
  • Added some missing Eq and Show instances (thanks Grégoire Charvet)

New features:

  • The editor now binds Control-U to delete to beginning of line (thanks Hans-Peter Deifel)

Bug fixes:

  • List: avoid runtime exception by ensuring item height is always at least 1

0.8

API changes:

  • Center: added layer-friendly centering functions centerLayer, hCenterLayer, and vCenterLayer.

Functionality changes:

  • Dialog now uses new layer-friendly centering functions. This makes it possible to overlay a Dialog on top of your UI when you use a Dialog rendering as a separate layer.
  • Updated the LayerDemo to demonstrate a centered layer.
  • The renderer now uses a default Vty Picture background of spaces with the default attribute, rather than using ClearBackground (the Vty default). This is to compensate for an unexpected attribute behavior in Vty when ClearBackgrounds (see https://github.com/coreyoconnor/vty/issues/95)

0.7

NOTE: this release includes many API changes. Please see the “Widget Names” section of the Brick User Guide for details on the fundamentals!

API changes:

  • The “Name” type was removed. In its place we now have a name type variable (“n”) attached to many types (including EventM, CursorLocation, App, Editor, List, and FocusRing). This change makes it possible to:
    • Avoid runtime errors due to name typos
    • Achieve compile-time guarantees about name matching and usage
    • Force widget functions to be name-agnostic by being polymorphic in their name type
    • Clean up focus handling by making it possible to pattern-match on cursor location names
  • The EditDemo demonstration program was updated to use a FocusRing.
  • Added the “Named” type class to Brick.Widgets.Core for types that store names. This type class is used to streamline the Focus interface; see Brick.Focus.withFocusRing and EditDemo.hs.
  • The List and Editor types are now parameterized on names.
  • The List widget is now focus-aware; its rendering function now takes a boolean indicating whether it should be rendered with focus. The List uses the following attributes now:
    • When not focused, the cursor is rendered with listSelectedAttr.
    • When focused, the cursor is rendered with listSelectedFocusedAttr.
  • The Editor widget is now focus-aware; its rendering function now takes a boolean indicating whether it should be rendered with focus. The Editor uses the following attributes now:
    • When not focused, the widget is rendered with editAttr.
    • When focused, the widget is rendered with editFocusedAttr.
  • The Dialog’s name constructor parameter and lens were removed.
  • The ‘viewport’ function was modified to raise a runtime exception if the widget name it receives is used more than once during the rendering of a single frame.

Miscellaneous:

  • Many modules now use conditional imports to silence redundancy warnings on GHCs with newer Preludes (e.g. including Monoid, Foldable, Traversable, Applicative, etc.)

0.6.4

Bug fixes:

  • Add missing Functor instance for Next type (thanks Markus Hauck)

0.6.3

Bug fixes:

  • List: the list now properly renders when the available height is not a multiple of the item height. Previously the list size would decrease relative to the available height. Now the list renders enough items to fill the space even if the top-most or bottom-most item is partially visible, which is the expected behavior.

0.6.2

Bug fixes:

  • Editor: the ‘editor’ initial content parameter is now correctly split on newlines to ensure that the underlying editor zipper is initialized properly. (fixes #56; thanks @listx)

0.6.1

Package changes:

  • Added lower bound for microlens >= 0.3.0.0 to fix build failure due to Field1 not being defined (thanks Markus Hauck)

Documentation changes:

  • Updated user guide and README to link to and mention microlens instead of lens

Misc:

  • Fixed a qualified import in the List demo to avoid ambiguity (thanks Alan Gilbert)

0.6

API changes:

  • Brick now uses the microlens family of packages instead of lens. This version of brick also depends on vty 5.5.0, which was modified to use microlens instead of lens. This change shouldn’t impact functionality but will greatly reduce build times.

0.5.1

Bug fixes:

  • Fix negative cropping in hCenter, vCenter, and cropResultToContext (fixes #52)
  • Remove unnecessary Eq constraint from listReplace (fixes #48; thanks sifmelcara)
  • Mention Google Group in README

0.5

Functionality changes:

  • Markup: make markup support multi-line strings (fixes #41)
  • brick-edit-demo: support shift-tab to switch editors
  • Core: improve box layout algorithm (when rendering boxes, track remaining space while rendering high-priority children to use successively more constrained primary dimensions)
  • Core: make fixed padding take precedence over padded widgets (fixes #42) Prior to this commit, padding a widget meant that if there was room after rendering the widget, the specified amount of padding would be added. This meant that under tight layout constraints padding would disappear before a padded widget would. This is often a desirable outcome but it also led to unexpected behavior when adding padding to a widget that grows greedily: fixed padding would never show up because it was placed in a box adjacent to the widget in question, and boxes always render greedy children before fixed ones. As a result fixed padding would disappear under these conditions. Instead, in the case of fixed padding, since we often intend to guarantee that padding is present, all of the padding combinators have been modified so that when the padded widget is rendered with fixed padding in the amount V, the widget is given V fewer rows/columns when it is rendered so that the padding always has room.

0.4.1

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed a bug in the ‘visible’ combinator: If the size of the visibility request was larger than the available space, then the rendering of a viewport was toggling between two states, one with aligning on the end of the visibility request, and another one aligning on the start. This commit fixes it so that a visibility request is always aligned on the start if not enough space is available. (thanks Thomas Strobel [email protected])

Behavior changes:

  • Honor multiple ‘visible’ markers in a single viewport with preference on the innermost request (thanks Thomas Strobel [email protected])

0.4

API changes:

  • Added Brick.Widgets.Core.unsafeLookupViewport to make certain kinds of custom widget implementations easier when viewport states are needed (thanks Markus Hauck [email protected])
  • List: added listClear and listReverse functions (thanks Markus Hauck)
  • List: Derive instances for Functor, Foldable, Traversable (thanks Markus Hauck)

Documentation changes:

  • Hyperlink “Data.Text.Markup” inside Brick.Markup haddock (thanks Markus Hauck)
  • Fix typo in ‘Attribute Management’ section of user guide (thanks Markus Hauck)

0.3.1

Bug fixes:

  • EventM newtype again instances MonadIO (thanks Andrew Rademacher)

0.3

API changes:

  • Made EventM a newtype instead of a type alias
  • List: listReplace now takes the new selected index and no longer does element diffing

Package changes:

  • Removed the dependency on the Diff package

Misc:

  • Applied some hlint hints (thanks Markus Hauck [email protected])
  • Fixed a typo in the README (thanks Markus Hauck [email protected])
  • Improved the renderList documentation (thanks Profpatsch [email protected])
  • Types: added an explicit import of Applicative for older GHCs

0.2.3

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed viewport behavior when the image in a viewport reduces its size enough to render the viewport offsets invalid. Before, this behavior caused a crash during image croppin in vty; now the behavior is handled sanely (fixes #22; reported by Hans-Peter Deifel)

0.2.2

Demo changes:

  • Improved the list demo by using characters instead of integers in the demo list and cleaned up item-adding code (thanks Jøhannes Lippmann [email protected])

0.2.1

Bug fixes:

  • List:
    • Fixed size policy of lists so that rather than being Fixed/Fixed, they are Greedy/Greedy. This resolves issues that arise when the box layout widget renders a list widget alongside a Fixed/Fixed one. (Closes issue #17, thanks Karl Voelker)
  • Scrolling:
    • vScrollPage actually scrolls vertically now rather than horizontally (Thanks Hans-Peter Deifel [email protected])

0.2

API changes:

  • Added top-level Brick module that re-exports the most important modules in the library.
  • List:
    • Now instead of passing the item-drawing function to the list state constructor, it is passed to renderList
    • renderList now takes the row height of the list’s item widgets. The list item-drawing function must respect this in order for scrolling to work properly. This change made it possible to optimize the list so that it only draws widgets visible in the viewport rather than rendering all of the list’s items (even the ones off-screen). But to do this we must be able to tell in advance how high each one is, so we require this parameter. In addition this change means that lists no longer support items of different heights.
    • The list now uses Data.Vector instead of [a] to store items; this permits efficient slicing so we can do the optimized rendering described above.
  • The HandleEvent type class handleEvent method now runs in EventM. This permits event-handling code implemented in terms of HandleEvent to do get access to viewport state and to run IO code, making it just as powerful as code in the top-level EventM handler.
  • Many types were moved from Brick.Widgets.Core and Brick.Main to Brick.Types, making the former module merely a home for Widget constructors and combinators.
  • The IsString instance for Widget was removed; this might be reinstated later, but this package provides enough IsString instances that things can get confusing.
  • EventM is now reader monad over the most recent rendering pass’s viewport state, in addition to being a state monad over viewport requests for the renderer. Added the lookupViewport function to provide access to the most recent viewport state. Exported the Viewport type and lenses.
  • Now that handleEvent is now an EventM action, composition with continue et al got a little messier when using lenses to update the application state. To help with this, there is now handleEventLensed.

Bugfixes:

  • Lists now perform well with 10 items or a million (see above; fixes #7, thanks Simon Michael)
  • Added more haddock notes to Brick.Widgets.Core about growth policies.
  • Forced evaluation of render states to address a space leak in the renderer (fixes #14, thanks Sebastian Reuße [email protected])
  • str: only reference string content that can be shown (eliminates a space leak, fixes #14, thanks Sebastian Reuße [email protected])

Misc:

  • Added a makefile for the user guide.
  • List: added support for Home and End keys (thanks Simon Michael)
  • Viewports: when rendering viewports, scroll requests from EventM are processed before visibility requests from the rendering process; this reverses this previous order of operations but permits user-supplied event handlers to reset viewports when desired.

Package changes:

  • Added deepseq dependency

0.1

Initial release