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Imtui

ImTui: Immediate Mode Text-based User Interface C++ Library

From ggerganov·Updated June 16, 2026·View on GitHub·

**imtui** is a ImTui: Immediate Mode Text-based User Interface C++ Library The project is written primarily in C++, distributed under the MIT License license, first published in 2019. It has gained significant community traction with 3,587 stars and 155 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: text, tui, ui, user-interface.

Latest release: v1.0.5ImTui v1.0.5
April 8, 2021View Changelog →

imtui

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ImTui v1.0.4 badge
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ImTui is an immediate mode text-based user interface library. Supports 256 ANSI colors and mouse/keyboard input.

<p align="center"> <a href="https://asciinema.org/a/JsUQsJyCchqlsQzm1P0CN4OJU"> <img alt="ImTui basic" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/AcKDr9ZyW3RWyNZRg1/giphy.gif"></img> </a> <br> <i>A very basic ImTui example</i> </p>
<p align="center"> <a href="https://slack.ggerganov.com"> <img alt="Slack client" src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1991296/180660513-e9471200-11b1-4e79-bec0-e2d313dfd6a6.gif"></img> </a> <br> <i>Text-based client for <a href="https://slack.com">Slack</a></i> </p>
<p align="center"> <a href="https://imtui.ggerganov.com"> <img alt="Tables" src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1991296/140774086-285cb34f-0851-47b0-82e5-2e8a5bf174ac.gif"></img> </a> <br> <i>Tables example</i> </p>
<p align="center"> <a href="https://github.com/ggerganov/hnterm"> <img alt="HNTerm" src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1991296/131371951-3af42be8-657e-4542-a46a-0370cfc431d8.gif"></img> </a> <br> <i>Text-based client for <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/news">Hacker News</a></i> </p>
<p align="center"> <a href="https://asciinema.org/a/VUKWZM70PxRCHueyPFXy9smU8"> <img alt="WTF util" src="https://asciinema.org/a/VUKWZM70PxRCHueyPFXy9smU8.svg"></img> </a> <br> <i>Text-based configuration editor for the <a href="https://wtfutil.com/">WTF Dashboard</a></i> </p>

Live demo in the browser

Even though this library is supposed to be used in the terminal, for convenience here is an Emscripten build to demonstrate what it looks like, by simulating a console in the browser:

Note: the demos work best with Chrome

Details

This library is 99.9% based on the popular Dear ImGui library. ImTui simply provides an ncurses interface in order to draw and interact with widgets in the terminal. The entire Dear ImGui interface is available out-of-the-box.

For basic usage of ImTui, check one of the available samples:

Building

ImTui depends only on libncurses

Linux and Mac:

bash
git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/imtui --recursive cd imtui mkdir build && cd build cmake .. make ./bin/imtui-example-ncurses0

Windows:

Partial Windows support is currently available using MSYS2 + MinGW + PDCurses:

# install required packages in an MSYS2 terminal:
pacman -S git cmake make mingw-w64-x86_64-dlfcn mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-pdcurses mingw-w64-x86_64-curl

# build
git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/imtui --recursive
cd imtui
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

./bin/hnterm.exe


For more information, checkout the following discussion: #19

Emscripten:

bash
git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/imtui --recursive cd imtui mkdir build && cd build emconfigure cmake .. make

Contributors

Showing top 7 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub →

This article is auto-generated from ggerganov/imtui via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/17/2026