Console.Lib.Inspector 5.12.2301

Console.Lib

A .NET library for building terminal applications with dock-based layouts, widgets, mouse/keyboard input, VT styling, and Sixel graphics rendering. AOT-compatible, targeting .NET 10.

This repo also ships mdcat — a cat-for-Markdown CLI built on the library (see below).

Features

• Dock-based layout — top/bottom/left/right/fill panels that recompute on terminal resize, built on DIR.Lib's surface-neutral DockLayout<T> engine
• Cell-surface layout — CellLayout paints DIR.Lib's arranged LayoutNode trees (the same ones the pixel painter uses) to character cells, with click-region hit-testing
• Widget system — TextBar, TextInputBar, TextArea, ScrollableList<T>, TreeView<T>, Canvas<TSurface>, MarkdownWidget, MenuWidget
• Sixel graphics — high-performance encoder (14× faster than ImageMagick's built-in Sixel writer); plus Unicode sextant and half-block fallbacks for terminals without Sixel
• VT styling — VtStyle with 16-color SGR and TrueColor modes, automatic capability detection; StreamColor colours a CLI's plain stdout or stderr (off when redirected or under NO_COLOR, Windows VT switched on per stream)
• Markdown + LaTeX rendering — headings, tables, lists, fenced code, inline [text]{color} syntax, OSC 8 hyperlinks for clickable links, inline + display math (\(...\), $$...$$, \[...\]), \ce{...} chemistry markup, and images (![alt](path) rasterized to Sixel / blocks, with alt-text fallback). Parsing is driven by LALR.CC grammars in DIR.Lib.Markdown; Console.Lib is the VT-output layer. MarkdownOutput writes it to a CLI's standard output as mdcat does, with an OutputFormat (auto, rich, markdown, plain) for an --output-format option.
• Input handling — unified keyboard + mouse events with UTF-8 codepoint decoding, SGR mouse tracking in alternate screen
• Menu system — arrow-key navigation, digit shortcuts, mouse support, alternate/normal mode
• Cross-platform — Windows VT I/O via Win32, native VT100 on Unix/macOS

Quick start

dotnet add package Console.Lib

var terminal = new VirtualTerminal();
await terminal.InitAsync();

terminal.EnterAlternateScreen();

var panel = new Panel(terminal);
var statusBar = new TextBar(panel.Dock(DockStyle.Bottom, 1));
var main = panel.Fill();

statusBar.Text(" Ready").Style(new VtStyle(SgrColor.BrightWhite, SgrColor.BrightBlack)).Render();

mdcat — cat for Markdown

mdcat is a tiny CLI that renders a Markdown file (or stdin) to styled terminal output using Console.Lib's MarkdownRenderer — headings, bold/italic, lists, tables, fenced code, OSC 8 hyperlinks, LaTeX math, and local images (Sixel / sextant / half-block, auto-detected). Color support is auto-detected, with a richer GitHub-Dark palette on truecolor terminals.

dotnet tool install --global mdcat   # .NET global tool (needs the .NET 10 runtime)
mdcat README.md                      # render a file
cat notes.md | mdcat -               # render from stdin

Prebuilt, self-contained native-AOT binaries (no runtime required) for Linux / Windows / macOS on x64 and arm64 are on the Releases page. See src/MdCat/README.md for all options, install methods, exit codes, and math-font details.

Building

dotnet build src/Console.Lib
dotnet test src/Console.Lib.Tests
dotnet run --project src/MdCat -- README.md   # build & run the mdcat CLI in place

Debug builds (Console.Lib.Debug)

The published Console.Lib is built Release, so the #if DEBUG types (ConsoleDebugInspector and the rest of the debug-inspector layer) are absent from it. Console.Lib.Debug is the same library at the same version, built Debug, and it depends on DIR.Lib.Debug. Reference one or the other by configuration (Visual Studio needs a restore after switching):

<ItemGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)' == 'Debug'">
  <PackageReference Include="Console.Lib.Debug" Version="5.12.*" />
</ItemGroup>
<ItemGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)' != 'Debug'">
  <PackageReference Include="Console.Lib" Version="5.12.*" />
</ItemGroup>

Documentation

See src/Console.Lib/README.md for the full API reference, architecture diagram, and detailed usage guide.

License

MIT