Silvery

Polished Terminal UIs in React.

Ink-compatible React renderer for terminals — same Box, Text, useInput API you know. Plus everything you wish Ink had.

Work in progress. APIs may change. Feedback welcome.

$ npm install silvery react

import { useState } from "react"
import { render, Box, Text, useInput } from "silvery"

function Counter() {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0)
  useInput((input) => {
    if (input === "j") setCount((c) => c + 1)
  })
  return (
    <Box borderStyle="round" padding={1}>
      <Text>Count: {count}</Text>
    </Box>
  )
}

await render(<Counter />).run()

Familiar

• React 18 + 19 — hooks, refs, effects, suspense — all works
• Flexbox layout — Box with flexDirection, padding, gap, flexGrow, just like Ink
• Ink/Chalk compatible — same component model, @silvery/ink compatibility layer for migrating existing Ink applications

Better

• Smaller install — <500 KB gzipped (Ink 6 pulls 16MB into node_modules)
• Pure TypeScript, zero native deps — no WASM, no build steps — works on Alpine, CI, Docker, everywhere
• Incremental rendering — per-node dirty tracking, ~100x faster interactive updates
• Responsive layout — useContentRect() returns actual dimensions synchronously during render
• Dynamic scrollback — renders (and re-renders!) into the terminal's scroll history, not just alternate screen
• Scrollable containers — overflow="scroll" with automatic measurement and clipping
• Theme system — 38 palettes, semantic design/color tokens ($primary, $error), auto-detects terminal colors
• 30+ components — TextInput, TextArea, SelectList, VirtualList, Table, Tabs, CommandPalette, ModalDialog, Toast, and more
• Focus system — scoped focus, arrow-key directional nav, click-to-focus
• Extremely composable — use as just a renderer (render), add a runtime (run), or build full apps with any React state library (useState, Zustand, Jotai, Redux). Swap terminal backends (real TTY, headless, xterm.js emulator) for testing. Embed silvery components in existing CLIs. Use the layout engine standalone. Render to terminal, or (experimental) Canvas, or DOM
• Most complete terminal protocol support — 100+ escape sequences, all auto-negotiated: 12 OSC (hyperlinks, clipboard, palette, text sizing, semantic prompts, notifications), 35+ CSI (cursor, mouse modes, paste, focus, sync output, device queries), 50+ SGR (6 underline styles, underline colors, truecolor, 256-color), full Kitty keyboard (5 flags), full SGR mouse (any-event, drag, wheel)

Packages

Package	Description
silvery	Components, hooks, renderer — the one package you need
@silvery/test	Testing utilities and locators
@silvery/ink	Ink compatibility layer — migrate existing Ink apps with minimal changes

Ecosystem

Project	What
Termless	Headless terminal testing — like Playwright for terminal apps
Flexily	Pure JS flexbox layout engine (Yoga-compatible, zero WASM)
Loggily	Debug + structured logging + tracing
terminfo.dev	Terminal feature support database, powered by Termless

Coming

• Renderers — Canvas 2D, Web DOM (experimental today, production later)
• Frameworks — Svelte, Solid.js, Vue adapters
• @silvery/create — Structured state management with commands, keybindings, effects-as-data

Runtimes: Bun >= 1.0 and Node.js >= 18. CLI (silvery command) requires Bun.

License

MIT