Sunday, April 9, 2023

A beautiful TUI periodic table for Linux Terminals coded in C - no extra dependencies

The periodic table, also known as the periodic table of the elements, is a rows and columns arrangement of the chemical elements. It is widely used in chemistry, physics, and other sciences, and is generally seen as an icon of chemistry. (WIKIPEDIA)

In my last project in C I wanted to compile everything I've learned with graphical text interfaces and create a retro-looking periodic table that looks nice :)

Though not my best or cleanest code, it is intended to be used as a "demo" for the Lynx TUI. Is is also made with a lot of love.

The explanation of all the modules below:

(Increasing in order of abstraction until you reach main.c)


LEVEL 0: (BASE)

  • rterm.c : With the ANSI escape sequences to color our output in the terminal
  • tm.c : Create a millisecond timer for animations

LEVEL 1: (LOW LEVEL ABSTRACTIONS)

  • keyb.c : Creates a small keyboard abstraction to read escaped keys \e on Linux
  • scbuf.c (1) : Creates an intermediate layer between the display and the terminal as a double screen buffer - listbox.c (2) : Creates a list with a selector with horizontal scroll

LEVEL 2: (HIGH LEVEL ABSTRACTIONS)

  • ui.c : Different tools like textbox and window for user interface
  • global.h and about.h : text messages and global variables

main.c: Main program elements.dat: Database of elements, most of the info generated with chatGPT.

(1) http://oldstuff286.blogspot.com/2017/09/a-very-simple-screen-double-buffer.html

(2) http://oldstuff286.blogspot.com/2018/07/segmentation-fault-c-pointers.html