Consolonia

The Consolonia.Controls package provides several specialized brushes and controls designed for console-based UI manipulation:

• Brushes:
  • LineBrush: Draws a line.
  • BrightenBrush: Brightens the background color.
  • ShadeBrush: Shades the background color.
  • MoveConsoleCaretToPositionBrush: Moves the console caret to the position where the brush is drawn.
• Controls:
  • ConsoleCaret: A control representing the console caret.
• Platform Extensions:
  • OnPlatform: Extends Console as a target platform for Avalonia.

Consolonia.ManagedWindows provides managed windowing capabilities, drawing primitives, and platform infrastructure. The project is built upon several core architectural pillars:

• Drawing Primitives: Handled via DrawingContextImpl for low-level graphics.
• Pixel and Buffer Management: Managed through PixelBuffer for handling pixels, buffers, shading, and blending.
• Windowing Infrastructure: Rooted in ConsoleWindow for native window management.
• Platform Abstraction: The ConsoloniaPlatform serves as the fundamental root for platform-specific implementations.
• Text Rendering: FormattedText is used for drawing text, managing carets, and handling selections in components like TextBox.

Note: This project uses portions adapted from GUI.cs under the MIT license.

To use AsciiArt fonts in your Consolonia application, you must register them during the application startup process. Update your Program.cs (or your application builder method) to include the .WithConsoleFonts() extension method on the AppBuilder instance.

This makes the embedded AsciiArt fonts available to the system for use in your UI components.

public static AppBuilder BuildAvaloniaApp()
{
    return AppBuilder.Configure<App>()
        .UseConsolonia()
        .UseAutoDetectedConsole()
        .WithConsoleFonts(); // <---- Add this to add these fonts to your system.
}

Install the Consolonia.Controls.DataGrid package via NuGet to add text-mode optimized DataGrid templates, styles, and helpers to your Avalonia application.

Requirements:

• Target framework: net8.0
• Avalonia version 12.0.3
• Avalonia.Controls.DataGrid version 12.0.0
• Consolonia.Core and Consolonia.Controls

dotnet add package Consolonia.Controls.DataGrid

GPM is configured by editing the /etc/gpm.conf file.

Important Safety Note: This file is sourced by /etc/init.d/gpm. If you edit this file manually, you must protect all shell meta-characters from evaluation by quoting them.

Common configuration settings include:

• device: The input device path (e.g., /dev/input/mice).
• responsiveness: Adjust this value (e.g., 15) if the mouse response feels too slow.
• type: The mouse type (e.g., imps2).
• append: Additional arguments to be appended to the command line. Use quotes if containing spaces or special characters.

After modifying the configuration, you must restart the service for changes to take effect.

# Edit the configuration
sudo nano /etc/gpm.conf

# Restart the service to apply changes
sudo systemctl restart gpm

Once configured, you can apply AsciiArt fonts to any Avalonia control that supports the FontFamily property (such as TextBlock) using the fonts: prefix followed by the font name.

Note that different fonts have specific supported font sizes to render correctly. Always check the supported font sizes for the specific font you are using.

<TextBlock FontFamily="fonts:Consolonia#Standard" FontSize="8">...</TextBlock>

To use the controls in your XAML files, first declare the console XML namespace using the URI https://github.com/jinek/consolonia. You can then instantiate controls like LineBrush directly in your XAML markup.

<!-- Declare the namespace -->
xmlns:console="https://github.com/jinek/consolonia"

<!-- Use a control -->
<console:LineBrush Brush="Red" LineStyle="Edge"/>

To use managed file and folder pickers in your Avalonia application, you must enable the ConsoloniaStorageProvider during the app startup sequence using the UseConsoloniaStorage() extension method on the AppBuilder.

using Avalonia;
using Consolonia.ManagedWindows.Storage;

public static class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        BuildAvaloniaApp().StartWithClassicDesktopLifetime(args);
    }

    public static AppBuilder BuildAvaloniaApp() =>
        AppBuilder.Configure<App>()
                  .UsePlatformDetect()
                  .UseConsoloniaStorage(); // <= enables Consolonia storage dialogs
}