Cross-platform Terminal Manipulation Library

Crossterm is a pure-rust, terminal manipulation library that makes it possible to write cross-platform text-based interfaces (see features). It supports all UNIX and Windows terminals down to Windows 7 (not all terminals are tested, see Tested Terminals for more info).

Table of Contents

• Cross-platform Terminal Manipulation Library
  • Table of Contents
  • Features
    • Tested Terminals
  • Getting Started
    • Feature Flags
    • Dependency Justification
    • Other Resources
  • Used By
  • Contributing
  • Authors
  • License

Features

• Cross-platform
• Multi-threaded (send, sync)
• Detailed documentation
• Few dependencies
• Full control over writing and flushing output buffer
• Is tty
• Cursor
  • Move the cursor N times (up, down, left, right)
  • Move to previous / next line
  • Move to column
  • Set/get the cursor position
  • Store the cursor position and restore to it later
  • Hide/show the cursor
  • Enable/disable cursor blinking (not all terminals do support this feature)
• Styled output
  • Foreground color (16 base colors)
  • Background color (16 base colors)
  • 256 (ANSI) color support (Windows 10 and UNIX only)
  • RGB color support (Windows 10 and UNIX only)
  • Text attributes like bold, italic, underscore, crossed, etc
• Terminal
  • Clear (all lines, current line, from cursor down and up, until new line)
  • Scroll up, down
  • Set/get the terminal size
  • Exit current process
  • Alternate screen
  • Raw screen
  • Set terminal title
  • Enable/disable line wrapping
• Event
  • Input Events
  • Mouse Events (press, release, position, button, drag)
  • Terminal Resize Events
  • Advanced modifier (SHIFT | ALT | CTRL) support for both mouse and key events and
  • futures Stream (feature 'event-stream')
  • Poll/read API

Tested Terminals

• Console Host
  • Windows 10 (Pro)
  • Windows 8.1 (N)
• Windows Terminal
  • Windows 10 x86_64 (Enterprise)
  • Windows 11 arm64 (Enterprise)
• Ubuntu Desktop Terminal
  • Ubuntu 23.04 64-bit
  • Ubuntu 17.10
  • Pop!_OS ( Ubuntu ) 20.04
• (Arch, Manjaro) KDE Konsole
• (Arch, NixOS) Kitty
• Linux Mint
• (OpenSuse) Alacritty
• (Chrome OS) Crostini
• Apple
  • macOS Monterey 12.7.1 (Intel-Chip)
  • macOS Sonama 14.4 (M1 Max, Apple Silicon-Chip)

This crate supports all UNIX terminals and Windows terminals down to Windows 7; however, not all of the terminals have been tested. If you have used this library for a terminal other than the above list without issues, then feel free to add it to the above list - I really would appreciate it!

Getting Started

see the examples directory and documentation for more advanced examples.

Click to show Cargo.toml.

[dependencies]
crossterm = "0.27"

use std::io::{stdout, Write};

use crossterm::{
    execute,
    style::{Color, Print, ResetColor, SetBackgroundColor, SetForegroundColor},
    ExecutableCommand,
    event,
};

fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    // using the macro
    execute!(
        stdout(),
        SetForegroundColor(Color::Blue),
        SetBackgroundColor(Color::Red),
        Print("Styled text here."),
        ResetColor
    )?;

    // or using functions
    stdout()
        .execute(SetForegroundColor(Color::Blue))?
        .execute(SetBackgroundColor(Color::Red))?
        .execute(Print("Styled text here."))?
        .execute(ResetColor)?;
    
    Ok(())
}

Checkout this list with all possible commands.

Feature Flags

[dependencies.crossterm]
version = "0.27"
features = ["event-stream"] 

Feature	Description
event-stream	futures::Stream producing Result<Event>.
serde	(De)serializing of events.
events	Reading input/system events (enabled by default)
filedescriptor	Use raw filedescriptor for all events rather then mio dependency

To use crossterm as a very thin layer you can disable the events feature or use filedescriptor feature. This can disable mio / signal-hook / signal-hook-mio dependencies.

Dependency Justification

Dependency	Used for	Included
bitflags	KeyModifiers, those are differ based on input.	always
parking_lot	locking RwLocks with a timeout, const mutexes.	always
libc	UNIX terminal_size/raw modes/set_title and several other low level functionality.	optional (events feature), UNIX only
Mio	event readiness polling, waking up poller	optional (events feature), UNIX only
signal-hook	signal-hook is used to handle terminal resize SIGNAL with Mio.	optional (events feature),UNIX only
winapi	Used for low-level windows system calls which ANSI codes can't replace	windows only
futures-core	For async stream of events	only with event-stream feature flag
serde	serializing and deserializing of events	only with serde feature flag

Other Resources

• API documentation
• Deprecated examples repository

Used By

• Broot
• Cursive
• Ratatui
• Rust-sloth
• Rusty-rain

Contributing

We highly appreciate when anyone contributes to this crate. Before you do, please, read the Contributing guidelines.

Authors

• Timon Post - Project Owner & creator

License

This project, crossterm and all its sub-crates: crossterm_screen, crossterm_cursor, crossterm_style, crossterm_input, crossterm_terminal, crossterm_winapi, crossterm_utils are licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.