Terminal UIs that taste like candy.

SugarCraft is a PHP-native TUI ecosystem — forty libraries and twenty-two apps (sixty-two packages total). MVC-style Model–Update–View runtime, declarative styling, animation, charts, forms, SSH-served apps, telemetry, file managers, an AI chat shell. Composer-installable, PHP 8.3+, async on ReactPHP.

Quickstart → Getting started Browse the libraries View on GitHub

40libraries

22apps

289VHS demos

PHP 8.3+async / ReactPHP

MITlicensed

Every layer of the terminal stack — in PHP.

Click an icon to jump to its detail page. Every package is published independently, ships its own examples and PHPUnit suite, and shares a single styling vocabulary so they compose without glue code.

Built for the things Symfony Console can't do.

Persistent render loops, mouse + keyboard, alt-screen, async work without blocking the UI, multi-tenant SSH-served TUIs, charts and sparklines, animated spinners, multi-page forms, Markdown rendered straight to ANSI. The boring parts of CLI tooling — argv parsing, exit codes — pair perfectly with whatever Console framework you already use.

Forty libraries, one ecosystem.

Each library has its own composer package, README, examples, and PHPUnit suite. Pull just the ones you need — or grab the umbrella metapackage and get the lot.

SugarCraft

GitHub →

MVC-style Model–Update–View runtime — Model / Msg / Cmd / Program. Cell-diff renderer saves SSH bandwidth.

SugarStyle

GitHub →

Declarative styling + layout. Style, Border, Table, List, Tree, Layout::join/Place, multi-layer Canvas.

SugarCellbuffer

GitHub →

Cell-grid value objects — immutable Buffer (2-D cell grid) and Cell (rune/style/link/width). Shared foundation for all rendering, with minimal-repaint diffs via Buffer::diff().

SugarAsync

GitHub →

Shared async vocabulary — CancellationToken, Subscriptions, AsyncOps helpers (withTimeout, retry, debounce, throttle). Foundation for ReactPHP usage across the ecosystem.

SugarSpring

GitHub →

Damped spring physics + Newtonian projectile sim. The animation engine behind every smooth scroll in the stack.

SugarMouse

GitHub →

Self-contained Mark/Scan/Get mouse hit-testing + ZoneClickTracker for press/release deduplication, plus the bubblezone-style Zones Manager under SugarCraft\Mouse\Zones.

SugarWidgets

GitHub →

Seventeen components: TextInput, TextArea (dynamic-height), ItemList, Table (per-cell styleFunc), Tree, Viewport, FilePicker, Progress, Spinner, Cursor, Help, Key, Paginator, Scrollbar, Tabs, Stopwatch, Timer.

SugarCharts

GitHub →

Sparkline, Bar, Line, Heatmap, Scatter, TimeSeries, Streamline, Waveline, OHLC, plus Sixel / Kitty / iTerm2 image rendering.

SugarForms

GitHub →

Form library (port of charmbracelet/huh) and foundation for the form primitives SugarWidgets re-exports — Note, Input, Confirm, Select, MultiSelect, Text, FilePicker, multi-page Groups, six themes. Form-level KeyMap override per binding.

SugarMarkdown

GitHub →

Markdown → ANSI renderer. Word-wrap, OSC 8 hyperlinks, syntax highlighting, eight themes, custom themes via JSON.

SugarCli

GitHub →

CLI presentation helpers — StatusLine, Banner, Section, Stage, HelpText. Library-only, no Symfony Console requirement.

SugarSshServer

GitHub →

SSH server middleware framework — Logger, Auth, RateLimit, and a terminal middleware that runs a full SugarCraft app in each session. OpenSSH ForceCommand handles the wire protocol.

SugarMetrics

GitHub →

Telemetry primitives. Counter / Gauge / Histogram, four backends (InMemory, JSON, StatsD, Prometheus textfile), SugarSshServer session middleware.

SugarLog

GitHub →

Colorful leveled logger. Debug / Info / Warn / Error / Fatal with structured context, Text / JSON / Logfmt formatters, and sub-loggers.

SugarImage

GitHub →

Image-to-cell renderer — Sixel, Kitty, iTerm2, Unicode half-block; Picker facade; ext-gd.

SugarAnimation

GitHub →

ANSI/GIF animation toolkit — ext-gd decode, cell-grid downsample, solid / luminance-ramp presets, .ansi art playback. Viewer CLI: candy-gifview.

SugarVideo

GitHub →

Terminal video player — decodes mp4 (and more) on the fly and renders to ASCII / ANSI / truecolor half-block / sixel / kitty.

SugarColorprofile

GitHub →

Terminal color profile detection + ANSI / ANSI256 / TrueColor conversion. StandardColors and ProfileWriter.

SugarAnsiParser

GitHub →

ANSI escape-sequence parser + state machine (SGR, cursor, erase, DEC modes). Feeds into SugarVterm for cell-grid rendering.

SugarVterm

GitHub →

In-memory virtual terminal emulator. ANSI byte stream → cell grid + cursor + mode state.

SugarPty

GitHub →

PTY primitive for Linux + macOS — open / spawn / read / write / resize / size / setBlocking, Child lifecycle, SignalForwarder (SIGWINCH → resize).

SugarFocus

GitHub →

Focus-ring state machine — ordered focusable regions with a single focused member + wrap-around Tab/Shift-Tab traversal. Dependency-free.

SugarGallery

GitHub →

Poster grids & rails for media TUIs — a 2-D virtualized, sparse PosterGrid with owner-driven range paging, a Rail carousel, and a renderer-agnostic PosterCard tile.

SugarTreelist

GitHub →

Tree/list view with box-drawing prefixes, cursor navigation, word-wrap, and filter-as-you-type.

SugarConstraints

GitHub →

Constraint-based layout solver — a deterministic greedy solver (GreedySolver) behind a one-method LayoutSolver interface; the deprecated CassowarySolver name delegates to it. Swap strategies without touching call-sites.

SugarPanels

GitHub →

Box-drawing layout engine. H/V panel composition with weighted sizing, borders, and nested grids.

SugarOverlay

GitHub →

Terminal overlay compositor. Push/pop overlay views with z-ordering, positioning, and per-overlay teardown.

SugarNavstack

GitHub →

Navigation breadcrumbs. Mutable NavStack with explicit push/pop, width-aware breadcrumbs, and substring filter.

SugarDashboard

GitHub →

Dashboard TUI library — column grid layout, framed panels, status bar, tabs, and more.

SugarQuickpick

GitHub →

Fuzzy finder overlay. Type to filter a list, arrow keys to select, Enter to confirm. Renders over your app's view string while the background keeps updating.

SugarInput

GitHub →

Terminal escape sequence decoder — legacy keys, Kitty keyboard, SGR 1006 mouse, focus, bracketed paste. The missing input layer for PHP TUI.

SugarFuzzy

GitHub →

Fuzzy string matching with scored matched indices — Smith-Waterman + Sahilm algorithms. Extracted from sugar-forms; unblocks filter-highlighting UI.

SugarFlexbox

GitHub →

FlexBox layout engine + simple sort/filter table. Ratio-based sizing, gap, justify, align, per-column styling.

SugarToast

GitHub →

Floating notification overlays. Info / Success / Warning / Error types, configurable position and auto-dismiss.

SugarDatepicker

GitHub →

Interactive month-grid date picker. Keyboard navigation, min/max date constraints, locale day names, ANSI rendering.

SugarReadline

GitHub →

Interactive prompts — Text, Confirm, Selection, MultiSelect, Textarea. State-machine model, no external readline dependency.

SugarTable

GitHub →

Full-featured interactive data table — column definitions, StyledCell ANSI formatting, pagination, frozen rows and columns.

SugarDiff

GitHub →

Unified-diff engine — LCS line diff, context hunks, GNU diff -u writer and line-number scanner.

Sugar MCP Client

GitHub →

MCP client core — JSON-RPC 2.0 codec, stdio transport with bounded child lifecycle, initialize/tools handshake, tool narrowing.

SugarTesting

GitHub →

Test harness for SugarCraft apps — ProgramSimulator, golden-file assertions, snapshot helpers. Deterministic Model–Update–View testing down to the byte.

Twenty-two apps built on the stack.

Standalone executables — CLI tools (prompts, markdown, screenshots), full TUIs (file manager, git, SQLite, AI chat, games), and a project starter. Install via Composer, run as a CLI binary. Each has a detail page below with controls, architecture, and demo recordings.

CandyStarter

GitHub →

composer create-project sugarcraft/candy-starter my-app — pour your model into the mold and you've got a working app.

CandyScriptui

GitHub →

Composer-installable CLI of thirteen subcommands — choose, confirm, file, filter, format, input, join, log, pager, spin, style, table, write.

CandyCodeshot

GitHub →

Code → SVG screenshot. Traffic-light window controls, drop shadow, gutter line numbers, ANSI SGR parsing. No GD / Imagick.

CandyMdview

GitHub →

Markdown CLI viewer. Renders to stdout or opens a fullscreen pager. Eight themes, custom JSON themes, OSC 8 toggle.

CandyAnsiInspect

GitHub →

ANSI escape-sequence inspector. Labels SGR / CSI / OSC / DCS / APC / SS3 — feed it stdin, get a human-readable annotation back.

CandySshLauncher

GitHub →

SSH endpoint launcher. YAML / JSON directory of `ssh user@host` shortcuts, interactive picker, pcntl_exec into the chosen ssh.

CandyKv

GitHub →

Personal key/value store CLI — one SQLite database per store file. Glob listing, TTL, JSON/YAML import/export.

CandyMail

GitHub →

Email sending library. SMTP + Resend API transports, attachments, HTML + plain-text multipart, fluent interface.

CandyGitServer

GitHub →

Self-hostable Git server over SSH (authorized keys), Git daemon, and HTTP. Users, repos, access control, optional LFS.

CandyTetris

GitHub →

Tetris clone — SRS rules, 7-bag RNG, ghost piece, NES scoring, level-driven gravity. 474 tests / 7262 assertions.

CandyFiles

GitHub →

Dual-pane file manager. Tab-swap focus, multi-select, sort cycling, hidden-file toggle, delete-with-confirm.

CandyCode

GitHub →

TUI AI coding agent. Nine providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, SGLang, Bedrock, Vertex, custom), built-in tools, skills, hooks, sub-agents, MCP, and SQLite session history.

CandyCodeWeb

GitHub →

Browser UI for CandyCode's server mode — a Vite + Vue 3 bundle committed as dist/ and located by a one-class PHP shim, so candy-code serve needs no Node. Scaffold today.

CandyVcr

GitHub →

Record + replay sugar-core sessions — JSONL/YAML cassettes, Recorder hook, Player + Byte/Screen assertions, CLI.

CandyGit

GitHub →

Three-pane git TUI — status / branches / log, single-key stage / unstage. Shells out to git for every mutation so your hooks + signing config keep working.

CandySql

GitHub →

Terminal SQL client TUI — list tables, peek at row data, run ad-hoc queries, explore query plans, and monitor server health. Multi-driver: SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

CandyCodetime

GitHub →

Privacy-first coding-time tracker — JSONL on disk, SugarCharts-driven dashboard. No cloud, no MongoDB, bring-your-own-storage stays local.

CandyMinesweeper

GitHub →

Minesweeper — customisable board, recursive flood-fill, win/lose detection. Pure-state Board; first-click safety; deterministic-RNG injectable for tests.

CandyGifView

GitHub →

Terminal GIF viewer CLI — sizes to the viewport, plays in the alternate screen (24-bit blocks or luminance ramp) on top of sugar-animation. Antecedent: gifterm.

CandyImage

GitHub →

Terminal image viewer CLI — the chafa-independent front end over sugar-image: protocol auto-detection, sixel/kitty/iterm2/half/quarter/ascii formats, cell sizing, and a --dump-detect that answers "why is my image blank?".

CandyTop

GitHub →

Terminal system monitor — cpu, mem + disks, net and process boxes with braille graphs, gradient meters, menus, presets, 43 themes and btop-compatible config, over Linux /proc + /sys and FreeBSD collectors.

CandyFlappy

GitHub →

Flappy-Bird in your terminal — bird motion is a SugarSpring projectile, pipes scroll left at a fixed cell rate, collision is per-cell. PRNG-injectable for deterministic tests.

Five layers, no surprises.

SugarCraft is a layered architecture with one responsibility per layer. Dependencies flow one way through the stack, so you can grab as much or as little as you need.

1. Foundation

                    SugarCraft::Util — Ansi, Color, ColorProfile,
                    Width, Tty. Depended on by everything below.
                
2. Render + physics

                    SugarStyle — styling,
                    SugarSpring — spring physics. Pure rendering /
                    pure math — no I/O.
                
3. Runtime

                    SugarCraft — Model / Msg / Cmd /
                    Program. An MVC-style Model–Update–View loop on ReactPHP
                    with command and subscription hooks.
                
4. Components

                    SugarWidgets (components),
                    SugarCharts (charts),
                    SugarForms (forms),
                    SugarMouse (mouse zones). Composable widgets
                    that drop into your Model.
                
5. Tooling libs + apps

                    Tooling libs: SugarMarkdown (markdown → ANSI),
                    SugarCli (CLI chrome), SugarSshServer (SSH), SugarMetrics (telemetry),
                    SugarLog (logging), SugarColorprofile (color detection).
                    

                    CLI apps: CandyScriptui (one-shot CLI helpers), CandyMdview (markdown),
                    CandyAnsiInspect (ANSI inspector), CandyCodeshot (code → SVG),
                    CandySshLauncher (SSH launcher), CandyGitServer (git server),
                    CandyKv (key/value store), CandyMail (email sender).
                    

                    TUI apps: CandyStarter, CandyTetris, CandyFiles,
                    CandyCode, CandyGit, CandySql, CandyCodetime, CandyMinesweeper,
                    SugarAnimation, CandyTop, CandyFlappy.
                    

                    Web UI: CandyCodeWeb (browser face of CandyCode).
                

⚡

Async-first

ReactPHP event loop under the hood. Cmds are closures dispatched on the loop; the render thread never blocks on I/O.

📐

Immutable values

Immutable value objects across the fleet — with*() returns a new instance. sugar-style carries a documented naming exception (bare bold()/fg() builders over a private with()).

🧪

Testable by design

Pure update functions and snapshot ANSI tests. No tmp dirs, no mocks for the renderer — just assert against the frame.

🎨

One styling vocabulary

Every package speaks SugarCraft\Style\Style. Mix SugarMarkdown output into a SugarWidgets Viewport, wrap that with a SugarStyle Border — they all compose.

🔐

SSH the easy way

SugarSshServer leans on ForceCommand. sshd handles auth, ciphers, fail2ban, audit logs — you get a clean middleware programming model.

📦

No native extensions

Pure-PHP base flow. ext-pcntl, ext-gd, ext-ssh2 are optional for niche features.

See them run.

VHS-recorded GIFs of every interactive demo, regenerated on every push that touches the corresponding source. Two-hundred-eighty-nine demos in total — these are the headliners; click into any library page for its full set.

Accessibility note: the previews are looping GIF recordings. A reduced-motion preference stops this site's own transitions and animations, but browsers cannot pause an animated <img> — the TUIs themselves honour REDUCE_MOTION / PREFERS_REDUCED_MOTION where supported (sugar-spring, sugar-colorprofile).

From `composer require` to a working counter in ten lines.

Install the umbrella, drop the snippet below into a file, php counter.php. ↑ ↓ to count, q to quit.

1. Install

composer require sugarcraft/sugarcraft

2. Write the model

use SugarCraft\Core\{Cmd, KeyType, Model, Msg, Program};
use SugarCraft\Core\Msg\KeyMsg;

final class Counter implements Model {
    public function __construct(public readonly int $n = 0) {}
    public function init(): ?\Closure { return null; }

    public function update(Msg $msg): array {
        if ($msg instanceof KeyMsg && $msg->rune === 'q') return [$this, Cmd::quit()];
        return [match (true) {
            $msg instanceof KeyMsg && $msg->type === KeyType::Up   => new self($this->n + 1),
            $msg instanceof KeyMsg && $msg->type === KeyType::Down => new self($this->n - 1),
            default => $this,
        }, null];
    }

    public function view(): string { return "n = {$this->n}\n↑ ↓ to count, q to quit\n"; }
}

(new Program(new Counter()))->run();

3. Run it

php counter.php

Want a project skeleton instead?

composer create-project sugarcraft/candy-starter my-app scaffolds a runnable counter app with PHPUnit wired up — see CandyStarter.

Why pick SugarCraft?

Three flavours of "build a TUI in PHP" — pick the row that matches your project's needs. (Full reasoning on the comparison page.)

Capability	SugarCraft	Symfony Console	`readline` / raw
MVC-style Model–Update–View runtime (Model / Msg / Cmd)	✓	—	—
Async event loop (ReactPHP)	✓	partial	—
Declarative styling (CSS-like flexbox / borders)	✓	manual	—
Composable form library	✓ (SugarForms)	—	—
Mouse + key bindings	✓	—	—
SSH-served apps (multi-tenant)	✓ (SugarSshServer)	—	—
Charts / sparklines / heatmaps	✓ (SugarCharts)	—	—
One-shot CLI prompts	✓ (CandyScriptui)	primitive	—
Markdown → ANSI rendering	✓ (SugarMarkdown)	—	—
Code → SVG screenshots	✓ (CandyCodeshot)	—	—
Telemetry primitives (StatsD / Prom)	✓ (SugarMetrics)	—	—