Tachikoma.jl is a pure-Julia framework for building rich, interactive terminal applications. It uses an Elm-inspired Model/update!/view architecture with a 60fps event loop, double-buffered rendering, 30+ composable widgets, and built-in recording/export. GitHub: github.com/kahliburke/Tachikoma.jl Docs: kahliburke.github.io/Tachikoma.jl [hero demo] Install using Pkg Pkg.add("Tachikoma") Requires Julia 1.12+. What’s in the box Architecture — Define a Model struct, write update! for events, write view to render. The framework handles the event loop, frame pacing, and diff-based terminal output. 30+ widgets — Text inputs, text areas, code editor with syntax highlighting, data tables with column resize/sort, forms with validation, tree views, charts, sparklines, calendars, modals, dropdowns, markdown viewer, and more. Constraint layouts — Fixed, Fill, Percent, Min, Max, and Ratio constraints with nested horizontal/vertical splits. Draggable resizable pane borders with layout persistence via Preferences.jl. Animation — Tweens with 10 easing functions, physics-based springs with retarget!, timeline composition (sequence, stagger, parallel), and organic effects (pulse, breathe, shimmer, jitter, flicker, drift). Graphics — Three rendering backends: Braille dots (2x4 per cell), quadrant blocks (2x2), and pixel rendering via Kitty or sixel protocol (16x32 per cell). Vector drawing API with lines, arcs, circles, and filled shapes. 11 themes — Cyberpunk, retro, and classic palettes (Kokaku, Esper, Motoko, Kaneda, Neuromancer, Catppuccin, Solarized, Dracula, Outrun, Zenburn, Iceberg) with hot-swap switching at runtime. Async tasks — spawn_task! / TaskQueue for background work that delivers results back to the main thread as events, preserving the single-threaded Elm architecture. Cancel tokens, timers, and repeat scheduling. Recording & export — Live recording via Ctrl+R, headless record_app() / record_widget() for CI/docs, native .tach format with Zstd compression, export to SVG and GIF. Testing — TestBackend for headless widget rendering with char_at(), style_at(), row_text(), find_text() inspection APIs. Quick example A Game of Life in ~30 lines: using Tachikoma @kwdef mutable struct Life <: Model quit::Bool = false grid::Matrix{Bool} = rand(24, 80) .< 0.25 end Tachikoma.should_quit(m::Life) = m.quit function Tachikoma.update!(m::Life, e::KeyEvent) e.key == :escape && (m.quit = true) end function Tachikoma.view(m::Life, f::Frame) h, w = size(m.grid) g = m.grid nc = [sum(g[mod1(i+di,h), mod1(j+dj,w)] for di in -1:1, dj in -1:1) - g[i,j] for i in 1:h, j in 1:w] g .= (nc .== 3) .| (g .& (nc .== 2)) a, buf = f.area, f.buffer for i in 1:min(h, a.height), j in 1:min(w, a.width) g[i,j] || continue set_char!(buf, a.x+j-1, a.y+i-1, '█', tstyle([:primary,:accent,:success,:warning,:error][clamp(nc[i,j],1,5)])) end end app(Life()) Gallery Dashboard Form with Validation [dashboard] [form] Animation Showcase Todo List [anim] [todo] GitHub PR Viewer Animated Backgrounds [prs] [dotwave] Comparisons Tachikoma is designed full-screen interactive applications with their own event loop, like what you’d build with Textual (Python), Ratatui (Rust), or Bubbletea (Go). If you want to build a dashboard, data explorer, or game that takes over the terminal, that’s what Tachikoma is for. Tutorials The docs include step-by-step tutorials that build complete apps: Getting Started — A dice game covering model, input, layout, and widgets Dashboard — Multi-panel layout with charts, tables, and live data Todo List — CRUD app with forms, validation, and modal dialogs GitHub PRs — Async data fetching with DataTable and markdown rendering Animation Showcase — Tweens, springs, timelines, and organic effects Feedback, issues, and contributions welcome at github.com/kahliburke/Tachikoma.jl.

@kahliburke Let me know if you’d rather have this feedback as an issue, but going through the demos, it seems like pixel graphics are not working in WezTerm, despite WezTerm’s supposed support for both Kitty and Sixel graphics (in addition to the iTerm protocol, which I use most of the time) BTW, thanks for adding the light themes. They look good! I might want a bit more contrast (actually black foreground text instead of gray), but that’s something to play around with at some point…

[image] magister-ludi: I agree that the instructions break on Win11. TBH, that’s fairly easy to work around. Happy to provide further input if requested. julia> using Pkg julia> Pkg.activate("demos/TachikomaDemos") Activating new project at `C:\Users\me\demos\TachikomaDemos` julia> Pkg.instantiate() No Changes to `C:\Users\me\demos\TachikomaDemos\Project.toml` No Changes to `C:\Users\me\demos\TachikomaDemos\Manifest.toml` julia> using TachikomaDemos ERROR: ArgumentError: Package TachikomaDemos not found in current path. - Run `import Pkg; Pkg.add("TachikomaDemos")` to install the TachikomaDemos package. I don’t understand how the existing instructions can work without setting a working directory containing demos/TachikomaDemos. Looking at the source tree for Tachikoma it appears that there is a demos directory containing a TachikomaDemos directory with the sources for that package. Maybe the instructions would work if you start from the install location for Tachikoma? If I cd to .julia/packages/Tachikoma/...../demos/TachikomaDemos/ then the commands work and I am able to run launcher() and all the demos including the Life one which now has more pixels and equal aspect ratios in the display x,y. Nice! I don’t have any ideas on how to have the demos more integrated with the module. You could register a module for the demos as one approach. -chm

[image] goerz: it seems like pixel graphics are not working in WezTerm Actually, I think it was just that I was making my terminal too large. This is what “full screen” looks like for the “PixelImage Demo” [CleanShot 2026-03-26 at 11.53.31@2x] And, for the “Sixel Gallery” [CleanShot 2026-03-26 at 11.57.23@2x] Those looked like they were potentially just unicode block drawing characters (you’re going to have to look at these at full size, not the scaled-down display in Discourse), but I think that it’s just the actual image data that’s limited here. When I make my terminal smaller, it looks like [CleanShot 2026-03-26 at 11.58.38@2x] and [CleanShot 2026-03-26 at 11.58.10@2x] respectively, which looks very pixel-level. These seem to be auto-detected Sixel graphics. If I force the kitty protocol with export TACHIKOMA_GFX=kitty, neither demo shows any image data. Maybe because, as it turns out WezTerm only supports that protocol partially. It also doesn’t work inside tmux, but then, I don’t think I ever really tried to get Sixel working inside tmux, and probably could spend more time on that. It does work over SSH! I tried out the kitty-protocol too, inside the actual Kitty terminal emulator. The animation performance in full-screen is much better. Not surprising, since Sixel has a reputation for being low-performance. I don’t know if adding support for the iTerm Inline Images Protocol, which WezTerm also supports (and which I use routinely and have working inside tmux), would be an option that would provide better performance

Hi @goerz ! Are you using macOS (maybe yes due to the screenshots)? If so, I think there is a bug with WezTerm and kitty graphics Support Kitty graphics via files opened 04:40PM - 04 Mar 26 UTC (UTC) [image] eschnett enhancement Unfortunately, using Kitty graphics via shared memory does not work with WezTerm… on macOS (https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/7631). It does work when using files to transfer the data (I tested this). I believe that using a file is still much faster than inline encoding, and it would be nice to support this as fallback when kitty-shmem is disabled.

Tachikoma.jl v2.0.1 — Every frame, right on time Hi everyone! Tachikoma.jl v2.0.1 is out with a bunch of fixes and improvements since the v2.0 launch. Highlights: Frame timing is back to rock-solid — restored deadline-based frame pacer that locks precisely to target FPS (60, 120, 240, whatever you throw at it). The v2.0 Timer+Channel mechanism introduced ~2ms jitter per frame; this release fixes it with cooperative sleep() that also keeps sixel rendering flicker-free. Full Unicode grapheme support — zero-width combining marks (ṅ, n̈), CJK wide characters (你好), and precomposed glyphs now render correctly across all widgets: Paragraph, Table, TabBar, StatusBar, and the terminal emulator. Thanks to @ronisbr for the core Cell/Buffer work. New WidgetScroll widget — wrap any widget in a scrollable 2D viewport with click-drag panning, scroll wheel, keyboard navigation, and scrollbars. Great for dashboards larger than your terminal. Also by @ronisbr. Launcher overhaul — demos are now organized in a collapsible TreeView by category (Visual, Widgets, Data, Input, System, Test) with full mouse support. Performance — lazy pixel framebuffer clear saves ~5MB/frame memset when you’re not using sixel graphics; ASCII fast path skips grapheme segmentation for normal text. Windows resize fix — terminal size detection now works correctly after stdout redirect. Thanks @davidanthoff. Full changelog: Release v2.0.1 · kahliburke/Tachikoma.jl · GitHub

That should probably be a 2.1 release, there are new features there.

Is that what you would prefer? I can do one easily.

That’s how server works: Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 | Semantic Versioning Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 | Semantic Versioning

Thank you for the helpful lesson.

Tachikoma.jl v2.1.0 — Every frame, right on time Hi everyone! Tachikoma.jl v2.1.0 is out with a bunch of fixes and improvements since the v2.0 launch. Highlights: Frame timing is back to rock-solid — restored deadline-based frame pacer that locks precisely to target FPS (60, 120, 240, whatever you throw at it). The v2.0 Timer+Channel mechanism introduced ~2ms jitter per frame; this release fixes it with cooperative sleep() that also keeps sixel rendering flicker-free. Full Unicode grapheme support — zero-width combining marks (ṅ, n̈), CJK wide characters (你好), and precomposed glyphs now render correctly across all widgets: Paragraph, Table, TabBar, StatusBar, and the terminal emulator. Thanks to @ronisbr for the core Cell/Buffer work. New WidgetScroll widget — wrap any widget in a scrollable 2D viewport with click-drag panning, scroll wheel, keyboard navigation, and scrollbars. Great for dashboards larger than your terminal. Also by @ronisbr. Launcher overhaul — demos are now organized in a collapsible TreeView by category (Visual, Widgets, Data, Input, System, Test) with full mouse support. Performance — lazy pixel framebuffer clear saves ~5MB/frame memset when you’re not using sixel graphics; ASCII fast path skips grapheme segmentation for normal text. Windows resize fix — terminal size detection now works correctly after stdout redirect. Thanks @davidanthoff. Full changelog: https://github.com/kahliburke/Tachikoma.jl/releases/tag/v2.1.0

[ANN] Tachikoma.jl — A terminal UI framework for Julia

Package Announcements

digital_carver May 14, 2026, 11:48am 126

This one might be from Function keys i.e. F5 and F6 input random characters on windows console · Issue #28799 · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub which is hopefully fixed in Julia 1.13 (it also affects TerminalPager, for example).

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[ANN] Tachikoma.jl — A terminal UI framework for Julia

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