term.md

Terminal

term provides some functions to deal with the terminal in a quite portable way. It is heavily inspired by:

• lua-term: Terminal operations for Lua
• nocurses: A terminal screen manipulation library

local term = require "term"

Colors

The table term.colors contain objects that can be used to build colorized string with ANSI sequences.

An object term.color.X can be used:

• as a string
• as a function
• in combination with other color attributes

-- change colors in a string
" ... " .. term.color.X .. " ... "

-- change colors for a string and reset colors at the end of the string
term.color.X("...")

-- build a complex color with attributes
local c = term.color.red + term.color.italic + term.color.oncyan

term.color field	Description
reset	reset the colors
clear	same as reset
default	same as reset
bright	bold or more intense
bold	same as bold
dim	thiner or less intense
italic	italic (sometimes inverse or blink)
underline	underlined
blink	slow blinking (less than 150 bpm)
fast	fast blinking (more than 150 bpm)
reverse	swap foreground and background
hidden	hidden text
strike	strike or crossed-out
black	black foreground
red	red foreground
green	green foreground
yellow	yellow foreground
blue	blue foreground
magenta	magenta foreground
cyan	cyan foreground
white	white foreground
onblack	black background
onred	red background
ongreen	green background
onyellow	yellow background
onblue	blue background
onmagenta	magenta background
oncyan	cyan background
onwhite	white background

Cursor

The table term.cursor contains functions to change the shape of the cursor:

-- turns the cursor into a blinking vertical thin bar
term.cursor.bar_blink()

term.cursor field	Description
reset	reset to the initial shape
block_blink	blinking block cursor
block	fixed block cursor
underline_blink	blinking underline cursor
underline	fixed underline cursor
bar_blink	blinking bar cursor
bar	fixed bar cursor

Terminal

term.reset()

resets the colors and the cursor shape.

term.clear()
term.clearline()
term.cleareol()
term.clearend()

clears the terminal, the current line, the end of the current line or from the cursor to the end of the terminal.

term.pos(row, col)

moves the cursor to the line row and the column col.

term.save_pos()
term.restore_pos()

saves and restores the position of the cursor.

term.up([n])
term.down([n])
term.right([n])
term.left([n])

moves the cursor by n characters up, down, right or left.

Prompt

The prompt function is a basic prompt implementation to display a prompt and get user inputs.

The use of rlwrap is highly recommended for a better user experience on Linux.

s = term.prompt(p)

prints p and waits for a user input

term.isatty([fileno])

returns true if fileno is a tty. The default file descriptor is stdin (0).

term.size([fileno])

returns a table with the number of rows (field rows) and columns (field cols) of the terminal attached to fileno. The default file descriptor is stdout (0).