PerlTea 🥤

A terminal-UI framework for Perl in the Elm Architecture (model / update / view). It ships with four sample apps: a markdown reader, a log explorer, a slides tool, and a git dashboard.

The framework stands on core Perl only with a POSIX termios for raw mode. It is installable anywhere modern perl runs.

The architecture

use PerlTea;

package Counter;
sub new    { bless { count => 0 }, shift }
sub update {
    my ($self, $msg) = @_;
    return (PerlTea->quit, undef) if $msg->{key} && $msg->{key} eq 'q';
    $self->{count}++ if $msg->{key} && $msg->{key} eq 'up';
    return ($self, undef);                 # (next_model, optional command)
}
sub view   { my ($self) = @_; "Counter: $self->{count}\n" }

package main;
PerlTea->new( model => Counter->new, alt_screen => 1 )->run;

• model is the state. update folds a message into the next state and returns an optional command (a coderef run asynchronously whose returned message re-enters update). view renders a string the diffing renderer paints with the minimal byte delta. Subscriptions feed timers/streams in as messages; the loop never blocks.

Layout (CPAN distribution)

Path	Role
lib/PerlTea.pm	Public core: the MVU runtime, new/run, the model contract.
lib/PerlTea/Renderer.pm	Diffing cell-buffer renderer (G1).
lib/PerlTea/Input.pm	Terminal input decoder — keys/mouse/paste (G2).
lib/PerlTea/Style.pm	Declarative styling — colors/borders/padding (G4).
lib/PerlTea/Layout.pm	Stacks / flexible sizing / nesting (G5).
lib/PerlTea/Component/*.pm	viewport, list, text-input, spinner, paginator, help (G6).
lib/PerlTea/App/*.pm	the four apps (Glow, Logexplorer, Slides, GitDash).
cmd/<id>.pl	One runnable demo per framework feature (g0…d3), the acceptance smoke tests.
t/*.t	Test::More tests (the gate test targets).
testdata/	Golden / snapshot fixtures (tracked).

Building & testing

perl Makefile.PL && make          # configure + build (core ExtUtils::MakeMaker)
prove -l t/                       # run the test suite
perl -Ilib -c lib/PerlTea.pm      # compile-check a module
perl -Ilib cmd/g0.pl              # run a gate demo

Installation

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install        # installs the PerlTea library + the 12 ptea-* commands

The same PerlTea-0.02.tar.gz produced by make dist is the CPAN upload candidate.

License

Same terms as Perl itself (Artistic/GPL). See LICENSE.