Ahwoo.BRUTAL.NotCurses 2026.10.0

Brutal.NotCurses

Modern C# bindings for notcurses — a library for building TUIs and character graphics on modern terminal emulators.

The bindings are generated from the upstream C headers (vendored as a git submodule under submodules/notcurses) and bound against a minimal, core-only build of the native notcurses-core library.

Layout

• src/Brutal.NotCurses/ — main library; generated bindings (*.gen.cs) live under Generated/.
• src/Brutal.NotCurses.Generate/ — binding generator (CLI); parses the C headers and emits the bindings.
• src/Brutal.NotCurses.Native/ — native superbuild: builds ncurses and libunistring from source, then notcurses against them; zlib comes from the Brutal.ZLib package.
• submodules/notcurses/ — vendored upstream source (git submodule).
• samples/ — runnable examples.
• test/ — xUnit tests.

Build

Prerequisites (all platforms)

• .NET 10 SDK — every project targets net10.0.
• CMake ≥ 3.22 and Ninja — the native build is driven by cmake -G Ninja on every platform.
• Git submodules — both upstream sources must be checked out before building:

  git submodule update --init
  

• The native build downloads libunistring-1.4.tar.xz from ftp.gnu.org on first build (hash-pinned) and caches it under build/cmake/<Configuration>/Brutal.NotCurses.Native-ep/. That directory is not removed by just clean; delete it to force a full rebuild of the dependencies.
• After bumping a dependency pin (the ncurses submodule or the libunistring tarball), run just clean, which reconfigures the superbuild and rebuilds both dependencies.
• RocketWerkz GitHub Packages access — restore pulls RocketWerkz.BrutalPackage.Sdk and the RocketWerkz.Brutal.* packages. Configure a nuget.config / PAT with read access to the feed.

The native build is orchestrated by RocketWerkz.Brutal.Interop.NativeBuild: the <NativesTarget> build produces notcurses-core, notcurses-ffi, ncursesw and unistring and stages them into the package's runtimes/<rid>/native/ layout. Ahwoo.BRUTAL.ZLib supplies zlib on all three platforms.

This is a core-only build: no multimedia (ffmpeg / OpenImageIO), no C++ layer, no demos, and zlib instead of libdeflate. ncurses and libunistring are built from source and shipped inside the package; zlib comes from the Ahwoo.BRUTAL.ZLib dependency.

macOS (osx-arm64)

• Xcode Command Line Tools — provides clang, the macOS SDK, and xcrun (the binding generator calls xcrun --sdk macosx --show-sdk-path).
• Homebrew packages:

  brew install cmake ninja pkg-config
  

Linux (linux-x64)

• A C toolchain (build-essential or equivalent).
• Packages (Debian / Ubuntu names):

  sudo apt install -y build-essential cmake ninja-build pkg-config
  

Windows (win-x64) — experimental

Upstream notcurses only supports a MinGW / MSYS2 (UCRT64) toolchain on Windows, so the native build drives MSYS2's own gcc/cmake/ninja rather than MSVC.

Install MSYS2 (default location C:\msys64, or set MSYS2_ROOT), then the required packages are:

pacman -S --needed base-devel \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-toolchain \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-cmake \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-ninja \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-pkgconf

The package bundles libncursesw6.dll, libunistring-5.dll and libwinpthread-1.dll alongside notcurses-core.dll; zlib.dll comes from Brutal.ZLib, so consumers do not need MSYS2 on PATH.

export PATH="/c/msys64/ucrt64/bin:$PATH"

Commands

just build      # dotnet build (Release by default)
just test       # dotnet test
just pack       # dotnet pack
just sample     # run the samples project

Use just --set configuration Debug build for a Debug build.

Regenerating bindings

just generate

The generator parses submodules/notcurses/include/notcurses/notcurses.h and rewrites the *.gen.cs files under src/Brutal.NotCurses/Generated/. The generated sources are committed, so building on other platforms does not require regenerating them.

Regeneration works on:

• macOS — resolves system headers via the macOS SDK (xcrun --sdk macosx --show-sdk-path).
• Windows — resolves system headers via the MSYS2 UCRT64 install (MSYS2_ROOT, default C:\msys64); no separate LLVM/Xcode install needed.

Linux isn't wired up yet (it currently falls through the macOS path and fails).