console: Making OCaml Command-Line Tools Look Good

A command-line tool can print lines, which stay in the terminal's scrollback but look plain. Or it can take over the screen like a full-screen app, which looks good until it exits and takes its output with it. I wanted the looks of the second and the scrollback of the first, so I wrote console, an OCaml library for tables, trees and live progress rows that print into the scrollback. Its first version, 0.9.0, is now on opam: $ opam install console console-eio It comes in two parts. console is a set of pure, composable widgets. Each one is a three-dimensional object, drawn in the room it is given (a width and a height) at a given time, so the same widget can be printed once or animated. There are enough of them to write a command-line game where a camel jumps over lambdas, or a stock ticker. console-eio is the driver that feeds them the clock, the keyboard and the terminal's size changes, through Eio for now. Both need OCaml 5.4, on Linux or macOS. examples/camel/main.ml, recorded by…