# PTerm — Beautiful Console Output for Go Applications

> A modern Go module for beautifying terminal output with progress bars, tables, trees, spinners, charts, and styled text, fully cross-platform and highly configurable.

## Install

Save in your project root:

# PTerm — Beautiful Console Output for Go Applications

## Quick Use
```bash
go get github.com/pterm/pterm

import "github.com/pterm/pterm"

func main() {
    pterm.DefaultHeader.WithFullWidth().Println("My Application")

    pterm.Info.Println("Starting process...")
    pterm.Success.Println("Process completed!")
    pterm.Warning.Println("Low disk space")
    pterm.Error.Println("Connection failed")

    // Progress bar
    bar, _ := pterm.DefaultProgressbar.WithTotal(100).Start()
    for i := 0; i < 100; i++ {
        bar.Increment()
        time.Sleep(20 * time.Millisecond)
    }
}
```

## Introduction
PTerm is a Go module that provides a rich set of terminal UI components for beautifying console output. It includes progress bars, spinners, tables, trees, panels, styled text, interactive prompts, and more. Every component is cross-platform compatible and works on Linux, macOS, and Windows without terminal-specific configuration.

## What PTerm Does
- Renders styled text with colors, backgrounds, bold, italic, and underline
- Displays animated progress bars and spinners for long-running operations
- Formats data as tables, trees, bullet lists, and panel layouts
- Provides interactive prompts for text input, confirmations, and multi-select
- Generates bar charts and box elements directly in the terminal

## Architecture Overview
PTerm follows a printer-based architecture where each UI component is a printer struct with chainable configuration methods. Printers implement a common interface with Print, Println, and Sprint methods. The rendering layer detects terminal capabilities and falls back gracefully when colors or Unicode are not supported. All output goes through a central writer that can be redirected for testing.

## Self-Hosting & Configuration
- Import pterm and use default printers like pterm.Info, pterm.Success, pterm.Error
- Chain With methods to customize printers: WithStyle(), WithPrefix(), WithWriter()
- Use pterm.DisableColor() in CI environments or when piping output
- Set pterm.SetDefaultOutput to redirect all output to a custom io.Writer
- Enable or disable styling globally with pterm.EnableStyling() for test compatibility

## Key Features
- 20+ printer types: headers, panels, sections, trees, tables, progress bars, spinners, and more
- Cross-platform: consistent output on Linux, macOS, Windows Terminal, and legacy cmd.exe
- Interactive prompts: text input, confirmation, single-select, and multi-select with keyboard navigation
- Testable: built-in test utilities and output capture for snapshot testing
- Themeable: customize all colors and styles through the DefaultTheme or custom themes

## Comparison with Similar Tools
- **Bubble Tea** — full TUI framework with Elm architecture; PTerm focuses on output formatting rather than interactive full-screen apps
- **Charm/Lip Gloss** — styling library for terminal output; PTerm includes more ready-made components like tables and progress bars
- **Color (fatih/color)** — focused only on colored text output; PTerm extends this with structured components
- **Rich (Python)** — similar feature set in Python; PTerm brings equivalent capabilities to Go

## FAQ
**Q: Does PTerm work on Windows?**
A: Yes. PTerm supports Windows Terminal, PowerShell, and the legacy cmd.exe console with automatic color fallback.

**Q: Can I disable colors for CI/CD environments?**
A: Yes. Call pterm.DisableColor() or check pterm.RawOutput to skip styling when output is not a TTY.

**Q: How do I write tests for PTerm output?**
A: Use pterm.SetDefaultOutput with a bytes.Buffer, render your output, then assert against the buffer contents. PTerm also provides snapshot testing helpers.

**Q: Can I customize the spinner animation?**
A: Yes. PTerm includes multiple spinner styles and supports custom frame sequences via WithSequence().

## Sources
- https://github.com/pterm/pterm
- https://pterm.sh/

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Author: AI Open Source