wink

A TUI framework for Blink. Built with Blink. Don't blink.

Status: pre-alpha — not yet functional.

What is this?

wink is a terminal UI framework for the Blink programming language, in the same spirit as Ratatui (Rust) or Bubbletea (Go).

It is also a primary dogfooding project for Blink itself — building it surfaces real language gaps, exercises the stdlib, and results in something immediately useful for Blink tooling.

Architecture (planned)

wink follows an Elm-style TEA (The Elm Architecture) loop:

init() -> Model
update(model, event) -> Model
view(model) -> Canvas

The runtime handles the event loop, diffed rendering, and cleanup.

Planned layers

Module	Description
wink.raw	termios raw mode, non-blocking stdin
wink.input	key/mouse/paste event parser
wink.signal	SIGWINCH / SIGINT hooks
wink.unicode	Unicode display width (wcwidth)
wink.app	TEA event loop
wink.view	Cell buffer + diff renderer
wink.layout	Flex/constraint layout engine
wink.widget	Built-in widgets
wink.event	Event types
wink.style	Style builder ergonomics

The low-level primitives (raw, input, signal, unicode) live in wink for now. If they prove useful beyond TUIs, they can be promoted into std.term later.

Planned widgets (v0.1 scope)

• Text — styled text block
• Box — bordered container
• List — scrollable item list with selection
• Input — single-line text input
• Progress — progress bar
• Keybindings — help bar showing bound keys

What wink adds beyond std.term

std.term covers TTY detection, dimensions, basic ANSI colors, and cursor movement. wink builds everything else needed for interactive TUIs:

• Raw mode / termios (ICANON, ECHO off, cbreak)
• Non-blocking stdin reads
• Key event parsing (arrows, F-keys, Ctrl/Alt/Shift modifiers)
• Mouse tracking (click, drag, scroll)
• Alternate screen buffer (?1049h)
• SIGWINCH (resize) handling
• Unicode display width (wcwidth) — CJK, emoji, combining marks
• Truecolor / 256-color support
• Cell buffer + diffed redraws (no flicker)
• Layout engine
• Widgets

Non-goals for v0.1

• Images (Kitty graphics / Sixel / iTerm2)
• Animations / transitions
• Windows support
• Retained component tree (React-style) — TEA only for now

Usage (aspirational)

import wink

struct Model {
    count: Int,
}

fn update(model: Model, event: wink.Event) -> Model {
    match event {
        wink.Key(k) if k == wink.KeyUp => Model { count: model.count + 1, ..model },
        wink.Key(k) if k == wink.KeyDown => Model { count: model.count - 1, ..model },
        _ => model,
    }
}

fn view(model: Model) -> wink.Canvas {
    wink.text("Count: {model.count}")
}

fn main() {
    wink.run(Model { count: 0 }, update, view)
}

License

MIT