🚀 Modern UI Power, Now in Your Console

The wait is over. After months of passionate building, testing, and refining, Consolonia is stepping into the light — now available in beta for all who dare to reimagine what’s possible in the console world.

💡 Quick Start

The quickest way to get started is to install the dotnet template and create a project using the template:

dotnet new install Consolonia.Templates

Then you create a project using the template like this:

dotnet new consolonia.app

And you compile and run it like this:

cd MyConsoloniaApp
dotnet run

Learn more

🎯 Why Consolonia Matters

Consolonia isn’t just another toolkit or framework. It’s a bold rethinking of the console environment — one that injects the benefits of the Avalonia UI framework directly into TUI applications.

That means:

• Sophisticated layout systems without manual positioning headaches
• Rich styling and theming you’d expect from a desktop GUI, applied seamlessly in text mode
• Unified control patterns across TUI and GUI, so your skills and code can travel
• Cross-platform consistency, drawing from Avalonia’s proven rendering engine

With Consolonia, console developers finally get modern UI principles — data binding, templating, responsive layouts — all without leaving the terminal.

⚖️ What Sets Consolonia Apart

Here’s how Consolonia compares to traditional TUI frameworks:

Feature	Traditional TUIs	Consolonia + Avalonia
Layout & Positioning	Manual coordinates or simple grid; brittle with resizing	Avalonia’s flexible layout system with responsive panels and alignment
Styling & Theming	Limited color palettes, hard‑coded styles	Rich theming via Avalonia’s styling engine — full color schemes, gradients, and reusable style resources
Control Set	Minimal: basic text input, list, menu	Unified control library modeled on Avalonia’s UI elements — buttons, sliders, tree views, tab controls, and more
Data Binding	Rarely supported; requires manual refresh logic	Full Avalonia data binding system — bind to properties, collections, and commands for instant UI updates
Cross‑Platform Behavior	Inconsistent rendering and key handling across OSes	Avalonia’s mature cross‑platform abstraction layer for identical look and feel on Windows, macOS, and Linux
Event Handling	Ad‑hoc input loops; blocking or OS‑specific quirks	Async‑friendly event system, same patterns as Avalonia GUI apps
Templating	Usually none; monolithic rendering logic	Avalonia’s control templates — swap visual structure without touching logic
Tooling & Reuse	No shared patterns with GUI frameworks	Reuse Avalonia XAML, styles, and component patterns in both console and desktop contexts
Developer Experience	Steep learning curve for newcomers, few docs	Leverages Avalonia’s documentation, patterns, and ecosystem for instant productivity

🛠 Built for Builders

Under the hood, Consolonia combines Avalonia’s mature architecture with a snappy, console‑optimized rendering pipeline:

• Async-friendly event handling that just works
• Declarative UI definitions familiar to Avalonia developers
• Tooling parity: leverage design patterns and workflows you already know
• Cross-platform reach: Windows, macOS, Linux, same behavior everywhere

🌱 Join the Beta, Grow the Future

We’re looking for developers who believe the terminal can be as elegant as any GUI — and who want to build TUIs without giving up the structure, maintainability, and aesthetic control of a modern UI framework.

If that’s you, kick the tires, and help us refine Consolonia into a powerhouse for serious console development.

---

💡 Ready to explore?

To try it out install the Consolonia.Gallery tool from nuget:

dotnet tool install -g Consolonia.Gallery --prerelease

Then run the gallery:

Consolonia.Gallery

To uninstall the Gallery app.

dotnet tool uninstall -g Consolonia.Gallery

See wiki for documentation

https://github.com/jinek/Consolonia/wiki

Star History