Introduction

dado is a Go library for building terminal UIs. It provides a curated set of ready-made components — data grids, charts, modals, forms, graphs, and more — built on its own widget core directly over gdamore/tcell.

What dado gives you

Feature	Detail
Component catalog	26+ production-ready widgets
Theme system	26 built-in themes, runtime switching
Event system	Typed focus / key / change / submit events
Layout helpers	Flex and grid layouts built on the core widget primitives
Data binding	SliceSource and Changeset for live data updates

When to use dado

dado is a good fit when you need:

• A polished internal tool, CLI dashboard, or DevOps TUI
• Consistent theming across many components without hand-rolling styles
• A component you’d otherwise spend days building from raw tcell primitives

dado components are plain core.Widgets. You can drop down to the core package (Box, Flex, TextView, …) and mix hand-rolled widgets with the catalog freely — everything renders through the same Draw/SetRect surface.

What dado is not

• A web framework — dado is terminal-only
• An abstraction over multiple TUI backends — dado targets tcell

Architecture overview

your app
  └── dado.App          (owns the tcell screen + event loop)
       ├── theme.Provider   (resolves colours, fonts)
       ├── navigation.Stack (push/pop page stack)
       └── components.*     (the widget catalog)

Each component follows the same lifecycle:

1. Construct — components.NewFoo()
2. Configure — chain Set* methods
3. Mount — add to a layout or set as root
4. Event — react via OnChange, OnSubmit, OnFocus, …

See Lifecycle for the full picture.