crossterm-rs/crossterm

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4195 stars · 413 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Crossterm is a pure-Rust, cross-platform terminal manipulation library for building text-based user interfaces. It provides cursor control, styled output, terminal management, and input event handling across UNIX and Windows terminals.

Use cases

• build a TUI app in Rust that works on Windows and Linux
• read keyboard and mouse input events from the terminal
• colorize terminal output with ANSI, 256-color, or RGB colors
• move and hide the terminal cursor programmatically
• switch to alternate screen or raw mode for interactive CLI tools
• handle terminal resize events in a console application

When to choose

• you need a pure-Rust terminal library with few dependencies
• you need cross-platform (UNIX and Windows) terminal support
• you want low-level control over cursor, styling, and input events
• you are building a TUI framework or interactive CLI tool

When to avoid

• you want a high-level widget-based TUI framework (use ratatui instead)
• you need GUI windows rather than terminal interfaces
• you need terminal support on legacy Windows versions before Windows 7

Facets

library · maturity stable

terminal-ui developer-tools cli developer-tools cross-platform windows rust cross-platform tui console cursor input-events ansi-colors raw-mode alternate-screen command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="crossterm-rs/crossterm")