TUI guide (terminal user interface)

The TUI layer (tui/) is a windowing system on the framebuffer: desktop, taskbar, menus, forms, panels, a text editor and system apps - all keyboard-driven.

Starting it

oc> tui

The desktop takes over the screen. (In QEMU, drop -display none and use the SDL/ GTK window so you can see it; the serial console keeps running alongside.)

The desktop

• A taskbar with a launcher.
• Windows with the standard widget set: menus, forms, text areas, panels.
• The bundled apps cover the system monitor (processes, memory), files, a TUI editor, network status and system info.

Keyboard model

• Arrow keys / Tab navigate; Enter activates; Esc backs out.
• The editor uses the same line discipline as the shell line editor.
• tui apps are reachable both from the desktop launcher and as individual commands - see the TUI domain in the commands index.

TUI commands

oc> tui              (enter the desktop)
oc> tui-test         (the TUI regression suite)
oc> tui-hw           (TUI hardware/render diagnostics)
oc> tui-net          (network status app)
oc> tui-sysinfo      (system information app)
oc> tui-time         (clock/time sources panel)
oc> tui-sys          (system monitor)
oc> tui-drv          (driver inventory)
oc> tui-ext          (extension surface status)

Chinese console and TUI

The Chinese layer (chinese command) swaps the console into a 16x16 CJK font with GB encoding and a pinyin IME, and provides CN variants of the hardware/net/sysinfo TUI apps:

oc> chinese          (status of font/encoding/render/ime)
oc> ime -i           (interactive pinyin input line)
oc> lang             (language console switch)

System strings remain ASCII by contract; the Chinese layer renders user content - see chinese-console.

Extension surface

L1 modules can create TUI windows and widgets through tui/tui_ext.h (37 callable declarations - windows, menus, forms, panels, text). The TUI command bridge itself is the reference implementation: it enumerates the shell command table through the L1 API and renders it as a launcher. Extension guide: ../l1/tui-ext.md.

Building without the TUI

make CONFIG_TUI=n drops the TUI (and with CONFIG_CHINESE=n the Chinese layer) from the image - the boot then registers 216 commands (233 - 17). The off-path is real code with ASCII-equivalent routing, not a deleted feature. See ../dev/build.md.