I felt sorry for a friend who was frustrated with the I/O portion of writing a Rogue/Dwarf Fortress-like game this morning. Text mode is surprisingly painful in 2025 compared to 1985, when you could just grab a pointer to the text framebuffer and poke bytes.
So, I made a little open source library that presents a proper, modern graphics API for text mode games!
textgame runs directly in the terminal on macOS, Linux, Windows 11. 32-bit unicode, 24-bit color, double-buffered, keyboard input, blitter with transparency and clipping regions, and string printing with word wrap and numeric formatting.
