README.md

Malison is a small Dart library for drawing old school ASCII terminals in the browser. I harvested it from my roguelike game, Hauberk and it's aimed primarily at web games ASCII graphics. Think of it like curses for the web.

Using it

Add it to your package's pubspec:

dependencies:
  malison: any

Then use the library:

import 'dart:html';

import 'package:malison/malison.dart';

void main() {
  // Create or query a <canvas> element to bind it to.
  var canvas = new CanvasElement();
  document.body.children.add(canvas);

  // Create a new terminal. CanvasTerminal uses your browser's fonts.
  // RetroTerminal uses a built in DOS-style Code Page 437 font.
  var terminal = new RetroTerminal.dos(80, 40, canvas);

  // You can draw strings at given positions.
  terminal.writeAt(0, 0, "This is a terminal!");

  // You can control the foreground and background color.
  terminal.writeAt(0, 1, "This is blue on green", Color.blue, Color.green);

  // You can also draw individual glyphs -- character+color units.
  terminal.drawGlyph(3, 4, new Glyph.fromCharCode(CharCode.blackHeartSuit,
      Color.red, Color.white));

  // When you're done drawing, tell it to render all of the changes. It renders
  // in batches for performance.
  terminal.render();
}

Example

The repo includes a little example web application so you can see it in action. From the root of repo, run:

$ dart run build_runner serve

Then in your browser of choice, navigate to http://localhost:8080.