Posted by mariuz 12/17/2025
I’ve been struggling around issues in .Net Terminal.GUI v2 recently and it really made me miss the OG solid terminal UI library. Silly thing is back when this was a thing I didn’t even use it at the time.
I found this repo linked: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
https://github.com/gansm/finalcut
> FINAL CUT is a powerful and lightweight C++ library for creating terminal-based applications with numerous text-based widgets.
Reminds me a bit of the later versions of the old Norton DOS utils.
There was always this nagging doubt - is it buggy or don't I understand how to use it? In the end, I finished my little internal tool and was happy with it. Would try again.
The docs point so strongly at using v2 instead of v1, but I just don't get the sense it's reliable, and I feel 'stuck' for a good Terminal UI library for .Net now.
I don't know much about terminals but VTM was fun to play around. You could `ssh vtm@netxs.online` (now dead URL) and play around with dragable windows.
Or is that finally a lost to time meme? :)
Besides a nice OOP architecture, collections, iteration with callbacks, serialization, in a nice AOT compiled language with blazing compile times.
Kind of tragic what we could get in 1992, in 640 KB, in a single tasking operating systems, and how bad so many "modern" frameworks happen to be by comparison, regarding the whole development experience.