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owl

★ 526 Open GitHub ↗

A toolkit for writing command-line user interfaces.

// repository documentation

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# Owl
[![CI Status](https://github.com/fuelen/owl/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/fuelen/owl/actions)
[![Hex.pm](https://img.shields.io/hexpm/v/owl.svg)](https://hex.pm/packages/owl)
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```
   ,_,
  {o,o}
  /)  )
---"-"--
```
Owl is a toolkit for writing command-line user interfaces in Elixir.

It provides a convenient interface for:

* colorizing text using tags
* input controls with validation and casting to various data types
* select/multi-select controls, inspired by AUR package managers
* tables
* editing text in the `ELIXIR_EDITOR`
* wrapping multi-line, colorized data into ASCII boxes
* printing palette colors
* progress bars and spinners, with support for multiple bars/spinners simultaneously
* live updating of multi-line blocks
* capturing `:stdio` output and printing it above LiveScreen blocks
* working with a virtual device that partially implements
[The Erlang I/O Protocol](https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/io_protocol.html) and does not conflict with live blocks.
* running shell commands and daemons with secure logging and masked secrets
* rendering hyperlinks (OSC 8) in supported terminals
* true-color (24‑bit) ANSI sequences
* word wrapping and truncation utilities for colorized multi-line text

## When to use Owl

If you need a full-screen terminal application (think lazygit or htop), check out [TermUI](https://github.com/pcharbon70/term_ui), [Ratatouille](https://github.com/ndreynolds/ratatouille), or [ExNcurses](https://github.com/jfreeze/ex_ncurses). Keep in mind that full-screen TUI development is often harder than it looks — no DevTools, no visual inspector, limited layout primitives — so for complex interfaces a Phoenix LiveView might actually be easier to build and maintain.

Owl serves a different niche. It enhances regular scripts and CLI tools with just enough interactivity: colored output, progress bars, input prompts, tables, and select menus. Your program still runs top-to-bottom, prints to stdout, and exits — Owl just makes that output more informative and user-friendly.

## Demo
[![asciicast](https://asciinema.org/a/vOL2PtAEWB88S9G93Iojwprj2.svg)](https://asciinema.org/a/vOL2PtAEWB88S9G93Iojwprj2)

The code can be found in the [examples](https://github.com/fuelen/owl/tree/main/examples) directory.

## Installation

The package can be installed by adding `owl` to your list of dependencies in `mix.exs`:

```elixir
def deps do
  [
    {:owl, "~> 0.13"},
    # ucwidth is an optional dependency, uncomment it for multibyte characters support (emoji, etc)
    # {:ucwidth, "~> 0.2"}
  ]
end
```
Documentation can be found at [https://hexdocs.pm/owl](https://hexdocs.pm/owl).

owl

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