Summary

In this chapter, we learned the basics of terminal management by writing a mini text viewer. We learned how to use the Termion library to get the terminal size, set the foreground and background colors, and set styles. After this, we learned how to work with cursors on the terminal, including clearing the screen, positioning the cursor at a particular set of coordinates, and keeping track of the current cursor position.

We learned how to listen to user inputs and track the keyboard arrow keys for scrolling operations, including left, right, up, and down. We wrote code to display document contents dynamically as the user scrolls through it, keeping the constraints of the terminal size in mind. As an exercise, you can refine the text viewer, and also add functionality to convert the text viewer into a full-fledged editor.

Learning these features is important to write applications such as terminal-based games, editing and viewing applications and terminal graphical interfaces...