Monotome is a Lua-scriptable textmode rendering engine written in Odin.

Write Lua, draw glyphs, ship little tools.

It’s aimed at terminal-style apps, experiments, toys, and small games that want a textmode look, expressive scripting, and fast iteration.

What you get

A small set of primitives exposed to Lua via the global monotome table:

• runtime — lifecycle hooks (init, update, draw)
• window — window creation, metrics, and OS window state (fullscreen, borderless)
• draw — cell-space primitives (clear, text, rect)
• input — keyboard/mouse polling and event tracking
• font — managed TTF rendering with strict 4-face styling (Regular, Bold, Italic, BI)

Documentation

Full API documentation is available in the docs/ folder.

Notes

• Text rendering is SDL_ttf based (not a bitmap font sheet).
• Rendering is cell-space / textmode: you work in (col, row) coordinates.
• Monotome is not a terminal emulator; it does not emulate VT100 or ANSI codes.
• Built with Odin, SDL3, SDL_ttf, and LuaJIT.

Status

Active Development. The backend recently migrated from Raylib to SDL3. The core API is stable but subject to change.

Running Monotome

On Windows, run the monotome.exe:

• monotome/monotome.exe

To start building, edit main.lua at:

• monotome/lua/main.lua

Build (Windows)

From inside the monotome/ folder:

odin build src -out:monotome.exe -resource:src/monotome.rc