Design Goals and Philosophy

Ease of Use

T-W widgets, and the applications written with them, should more or less act as most users would expect. Key bindings should be consistent and make sense to most modern desktop users, edge case behaviors shouldn't be surprising, look and feel should match general expectations, and so forth.

The application developer is of course free to mangle expectations to their heart's content, but this should take intentional effort -- base behaviors and defaults should just DWIM for a wide audience.

Developer Experience

The overall Terminal::Widgets design aims to allow Raku programmers to write concise, clear UI code for a wide variety of applications, once they have passed the initial learning curve. In other words, in balancing "ease of first use" and "effectiveness for regular users", I decided on a middle course: accepting some extra up-front effort in order to increase overall day-to-day usefulness and power.

Of course this doesn't mean that T-W is strictly for experts or power users; far from it in fact. But I wanted to follow the general Raku philosophy that the easy things should be easy, the hard things should be achievable, and minimalism takes a back seat where it conflicts with either of the other goals.

(For help getting up to speed, see the Getting Started doc; after working through it, you should be able to read and understand any of the scripts in the examples/ directory, and from there modify them or build various simple UIs of your own.)

Compatibility

Even though essentially all terminal emulators in general use today (such as xterm, Ghostty, or Windows Terminal) are intended to emulate the same DEC VT series of physical terminals as a bare minimum standard, the various emulator programs and terminal fonts still offer vastly different feature sets and Unicode compliance levels.

Smoothly making the best use of available features in every case would be a heavy burden for the application programmer, in most cases resulting in only supporting the least common denominator or the features available in just the terminals and fonts that the programmer personally has available.

To avoid this, Terminal::Widgets makes it easy for widgets to support various feature levels transparently. All standard widgets make use of this, and will automatically adjust their look and behavior to match the user's terminal and preferences, based on autodetection from Terminal::Capabilities and lessons learned from Terminal::Tests.

Of course the existing premade widgets may not include everything needed for your UI, and for this reason Terminal::Widgets provides support for building custom widgets of your own -- and even releasing them in the Raku ecosystem separately knowing that they will automatically register themselves for use by Terminal::Widgets applications.