Supercharge your console application with Terminaux 7.0!

Since the inception of the first ever version of Terminaux that changed how the terminal applications work in terms of user experience, we were working hard to add new exciting features, while constantly improving existing features. Terminaux 1.0 was first released on August 6th, 2023, as a mashup project of several terminal-related libraries that are no longer maintained. Since then, several major versions, such as the latest 6.x version series, went live.

In between versions 1.0 and 6.1, several new features were added, such as the screen feature, the more powerful interactive TUI feature, and the mouse listener feature. However, we felt that the whole framework needed some kind of refresh, such as improving existing features. We also felt the need to make the terminal applications more powerful than before.

We are so thrilled to announce the next-generation version of Terminaux that will change how your terminal applications work. This is…

Terminaux 7.0!

This version of Terminaux brings many improvements and new features that we were working very hard for six months. We will outline the top three features that made it to Terminaux, which made this release so exciting and huge.

Improved mouse support

We have improved the entire input system by introducing an event-based console event listener that allows you to read console input more reliably than never before. It not only supports keyboard input, but it also handles mouse events across all platforms, whether it’s Windows, Linux, or macOS. Of course, Terminaux handles mouse events since version 4.0, but we are talking about the major improvements that affected the input handling.

We have managed to fix outstanding issues with regards to reading mouse input in your interactive terminal applications, including echoing input VT sequences when clocking on an area with your mouse in Linux systems. We’ve also added support for SGR VT sequences to add support for bigger console windows when listening to mouse events, which makes your interactive applications stronger.

For performance reasons, we’ve chosen to utilize the raw mode reading to make those improvements possible. This is necessary to also parse the keyboard input ourselves, while making sure that it’s compatible with Console.ReadKey() in modern .NET applications.

Shell improvements

Earlier, Terminaux 6.0 introduced a minimal version of the shell that was found in the latest Nitrocid versions. That shell was the Mirage Easy SHell (MESH) that allowed building CLI applications, such as the file management shell. However, Nitrocid implemented much more than that, such as file name completions, shell scripting, and process execution.

To unify the codebase from Nitrocid to Terminaux 7.0 as part of the Terminaux preparation stage for Nitrocid 0.2.0, we’ve moved the entire implementation to Terminaux so that all shell console apps can have the same power as Nitrocid’s shell. Additionally, Nitrocid itself uses this shell from Terminaux, since the technical preview beta that we’ll release soon. This is to also integrate bugfixes to the remaining applications all at once.

Your shell has become more powerful, because we’ve not only introduced shell scripting (.mesh files) for task automation, but we’ve also brought several features straight from Nitrocid’s shell implementation, such as filesystem support and process execution.

Localization and RTL

Alongside many features that got added, Terminaux 7.0 also provides improved RTL support, which increases the performance of terminal applications that use right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic letters, alongside the already-existing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) language support that we’ve introduced back in the fourth version of Terminaux.

Terminaux 4.0 introduced partial support for right-to-left languages, and we’ve improved this feature in this version of Terminaux to fix some of the issues that resulted from the conversion of RTL characters to visual map. We’ve utilized some parts of an existing library to incorporate further improvements that will be released in future Textify versions.

We are now proud to announce an improved right-to-left language support to make terminal applications able to utilize those languages. Those in Arabic countries and in other RTL-speaking countries can now use Terminaux 7.0 to improve their terminal application’s appearance.

Get Terminaux 7.0!

Terminaux 7.0 is free to obtain, and you can upgrade from whatever version of Terminaux that you have to v7.0 without any extra fees. What are you waiting for? Supercharge your Terminaux application by upgrading to Terminaux 7.0!