Notcurses for Jai

Jai bindings for notcurses, graphics/TUI library.

Important

Currently only Linux and macOS are supported.

Usage

Simply download/clone this repository, and add the directory to which it was cloned by passing the -import_dir argument or changing import_path field in target options. After that,

• For Linux: link your project against deflate, unistring, ncurses and m.
• For macOS: link your project against unistring, z and ncurses.

macOS note: use homebrew to install dependencies -- unistring does not support pkg-config so the homebrew installation path is hard-coded.

Example

// Do this when you are changing target options for your workspace.
my_paths: [..]string;
array_add(*my_paths, "modules/");
array_add(*my_paths, ..import_path);
import_path = my_paths;

my_args: [..]string;
array_add(*my_args, "-Lmodules/Notcurses/linux");
array_add(*my_args, "-lnotcurses", "-ldeflate", "-lunistring", "-lncurses", "-lm");
additional_linker_arguments = my_args;

Caveats

Dependencies

Unfortunately, notcurses depends on quite a lot of libraries. Hence, these dependencies apply to binaries that are built with these bindings. Here is a sample ldd output for notcurses Hello, world! example built with these bindings.

linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007f7c9692e000)
libdeflate.so.0 => /usr/lib/libdeflate.so.0 (0x00007f7c968f2000)
libunistring.so.5 => /usr/lib/libunistring.so.5 (0x00007f7c9670b000)
libncursesw.so.6 => /usr/lib/libncursesw.so.6 (0x00007f7c9669a000)
libm.so.6 => /usr/lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007f7c9657c000)
libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f7c9638b000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f7c96930000)

Build system

In order to use notcurses-jai, you will need to write your own metaprogram to compile your code. This is due to the fact that there is no CLI option to supply addtional linker arguments, which notcurses-jai needs to be linked against its' external dependencies.

Windows support

As of 24.03.2026, original notcurses has problems with rendering on Windows. Hence, these bindings, even when ported to Windows, will not work.

Todo

• Port these bindings to Windows.
• Expose configuration options to the developer, e.g. dynamic linkage instead of static, multimedia build, etc.
• There is probably a better way to link against external libraries.