plainmouth

plainmouth is a modular, plugin-based, text-based UI dialog server and client implemented in C. It allows other applications to display interactive dialog windows—such as message boxes, forms, and password prompts—inside a terminal using the ncurses library.

Features

• Plugin System: Easily extendable via plugins (e.g., message box, password input, forms).
• Scripting-Friendly: Includes shell scripts and command-line tools for automated testing and embedding into other workflows.
• Extensible Widgets: Widgets such as buttons, labels, input fields, text views, meters, and more.
• Keyboard Support: Handles navigation, focus, key codes, and resizing within terminal UIs.

Example Usage

Start the server:

plainmouthd -S /tmp/plainmouth.sock --debug-file=/tmp/server.log

Create a message box:

plainmouth plugin=msgbox action=create id=example width=30 height=7 border=true \
  text="Important message." \
  button="OK" \
  button="Cancel"
plainmouth action=wait-result id=example
plainmouth action=delete id=example
plainmouth --quit

Create a password prompt:

plainmouth plugin=password action=create id=pass1 width=30 height=3 border=true \
  label="Enter password:"
plainmouth action=wait-result id=pass1
plainmouth --quit

Building

This project uses autotools (autoconf) for configuration and building:

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Dependencies include:

• gcc
• make
• pkg-config
• ncurses and panel development libraries
• pthread

Documentation

• Documentation/architecture.md - architecture and widget model
• Documentation/plainmouthd-commands.md - command-level interface
• Documentation/ipc-protocol.md - low-level IPC wire protocol and examples

License

This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0.

Author

Alexey Gladkov.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues and pull requests.

---