Maintenance status and React 18/19 support — happy to contribute

[ralyodio]

Hi Guillaume — thanks for react-blessed. It's still the best option for blessed-style TUIs in 2026 (4.5k stars and meaningful downstream use), which is why I'm asking before forking or duplicating effort.

What we're seeing:

• Last release was 0.7.2 in March 2021.
• The peerDependencies still target React >=17.0.1 <18.0.0, so projects on modern React (18 / 19) have to pin React 17 in the relevant workspace (the workaround we've taken) or pivot to Ink.
• 39 open issues; nothing closed in years.

Two questions:

1. Is the project still being maintained, or effectively in soft-archive mode? Either answer is fine — we'd just like to know so downstream projects can plan.
2. If contributions are welcome, would you take PRs that:
   • Bump react-reconciler to support React 18/19,
   • Update peerDependencies accordingly,
   • Triage the older open issues that are still reproducible?

If you're not accepting PRs right now, no worries — we'll maintain a fork. We'd just rather upstream the work if you'd merge it.

Context on who's asking: we use react-blessed in production CLI tooling for the Infernet Protocol (GPU compute marketplace) and a sibling project. Both want React 19 elsewhere in the monorepo and currently pin React 17 in the CLI workspace just to use this library. Happy to put real maintenance time in if there's a path to it landing upstream.

Thanks either way for the project's existence — it shaped the React-renderer space and is still the right tool for the job.

[Yomguithereal]

This project has not seen activity in a long while indeed. This said, I don't see why this could not change :)

Feel free to contribute indeed, I shall review PRs if I have sufficient time.