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GitHub repositorymunificent/malison

malison

A little terminal emulation package for Dart.

malison project cover
Stars
79
Forks
9
Last push (UTC)
Nov 18, 2025
Project status
Active

Original README

English project snapshot. Visit GitHub for the latest content.

Malison is a small Dart library for drawing old school ASCII terminals in the browser. I harvested it from my roguelike game, Hauberk and it's aimed primarily at web games ASCII graphics. Think of it like curses for the web.

Using it

Add it to your package's pubspec:

dependencies:
  malison: any

Then use the library:

import 'dart:html';

import 'package:malison/malison.dart';

void main() {
  // Create or query a <canvas> element to bind it to.
  var canvas = new CanvasElement();
  document.body.children.add(canvas);

  // Create a new terminal. CanvasTerminal uses your browser's fonts.
  // RetroTerminal uses a built in DOS-style Code Page 437 font.
  var terminal = new RetroTerminal.dos(80, 40, canvas);

  // You can draw strings at given positions.
  terminal.writeAt(0, 0, "This is a terminal!");

  // You can control the foreground and background color.
  terminal.writeAt(0, 1, "This is blue on green", Color.blue, Color.green);

  // You can also draw individual glyphs -- character+color units.
  terminal.drawGlyph(3, 4, new Glyph.fromCharCode(CharCode.blackHeartSuit,
      Color.red, Color.white));

  // When you're done drawing, tell it to render all of the changes. It renders
  // in batches for performance.
  terminal.render();
}

Example

The repo includes a little example web application so you can see it in action. From the root of repo, run:

$ dart run build_runner serve

Then in your browser of choice, navigate to http://localhost:8080.

Bob Nystrom GitHub avatar
GitHub author

Bob Nystrom ↗

Programming language developer, ex-game developer, UI nerd, author of "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters".

@google, on @dart-lang Seattle, WAOfficial website ↗
LanguagesDartHTML

Packages published by this repository

Dependencies used

Dependency list 5 items

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