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KN-86 Deckline

blessed-contrib

What it is

Section titled “What it is”

blessed-contrib is the dashboard-widget extension for blessed (the Node TUI library). It’s the JS-world counterpart to termui and ships an even larger widget catalog: line / bar / stacked-bar charts, an ASCII world map with point overlays, gauges, donut charts, an LCD-style numeric display, a rolling log viewer, a picture viewer (terminal image rendering), sparklines, a table, a markdown viewer, plus two layout containers worth particular attention: a grid (relative cell positioning) and a carousel that auto-rotates through a set of full-screen views on a configurable interval.

Key takeaways for KN-86

Section titled “Key takeaways for KN-86”
  • The carousel layout is the standout idea. A carousel of full-screen dashboard views that auto-advance is something none of the other library references in the inspiration set offer. For KN-86 this maps onto the Bare Deck Terminal in a specific way: the idle state of the deck (no cart loaded, nothing user-requested) can rotate through STATUS / CIPHER / LAMBDA / LINK / SYS without the user pressing keys, giving the device an ambient information-radiator quality. Worth piloting as an idle-state mode. Cross-link to octoscope’s auto-refresh + change-pulse pattern — the carousel is the next degree of automatic.
  • The widget catalog extends termui’s inventory. blessed-contrib adds LCD display, donut chart, rolling log viewer, markdown viewer, and an ASCII world map that termui doesn’t ship. For KN-86 NoshAPI surface design: the LCD-display widget is exactly the right primitive for the big-glyph-headline-identity-object pattern from Batch 1 (golazo); the rolling log viewer is the right primitive for mission event logs and dispatch history; the markdown viewer is worth knowing about but probably not v0.1 (KN-86’s text is custom-formatted, not markdown).
  • ASCII world map with point overlays. Not directly useful for KN-86 (the device doesn’t render geographic data on the primary display), but the technique — a sparse braille / block-character map glyph with overlaid markers — is a reference for any KN-86 cart that needs to render a sparse spatial diagram (faction territory, dispatch route, mission location chain).
  • Picture viewer (terminal image rendering). Predates the more modern halfblock-▀ technique (asciinator) and uses block-character density. Lower visual quality but works on any terminal without truecolor.
  • Stack is JS/Node, not directly portable. The widgets are reference inventory, not adoptable code. The blessed/blessed-contrib codebase is one of the older big TUI libraries (predating Bubble Tea by several years); reading it is useful for prior-art context, not for direct dependency adoption.

Image

Section titled “Image”

No image downloaded — per the prompt, blessed-contrib is captured as a widget-catalog reference, not a visual one.

Notes

Section titled “Notes”
  • Cross-link termui.md — the Go-world equivalent. Together they define the widget catalog inventory for the KN-86 NoshAPI surface decision.
  • Cross-link the unified Deckline brief in inspiration/index.md — the recommended primary stack is Bubble Tea + Lip Gloss (Go); blessed-contrib’s role here is to expand the widget inventory the synthesis should plan to expose, not to compete as a substrate.
  • The carousel idea is the single most-borrowable single-line takeaway from this entry. Worth a Bare Deck Terminal scope discussion: should the deck idle into a slow auto-rotation?