`objdiff-cli`: Blank display/menus in interactive diff

[abelbriggs1]

I've been working on getting a objdiff workflow going in one of my PS2 decomps, replacing the use of asm-differ.

I've set up an auto-generated config file which correctly matches up in-progress TUs with their original counterparts. The truncated config looks like:

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/encounter/objdiff/main/config.schema.json",
  "custom_make": "ninja",
  "custom_args": [],
  "build_target": true,
  "build_base": true,
  "watch_patterns": [],
  "units": [
    {
      "name": "tmb/file",
      "target_path": "build/asm/tmb/file.s.o",
      "base_path": "build/src/tmb/file.cpp.o",
      "metadata": {
        "progress_categories": [
          "tmb"
        ],
        "complete": true,
        "source_path": "src/tmb/file.cpp"
      }
    }
  ],
  "progress_categories": [
    {
      "id": "data",
      "name": "data"
    },
    {
      "id": "sdk",
      "name": "sdk"
    },
    {
      "id": "tmb",
      "name": "tmb"
    },
    {
      "id": "newlib",
      "name": "newlib"
    },
    {
      "id": "gcc",
      "name": "gcc"
    }
  ]
}

Running the latest objdiff-cli in non-interactive mode with --format json-pretty, I can see that objdiff is definitely reading/parsing the objects, and report generate's output also matches up with my previous progress reports from mapfile_parser.

However, when I run a diff using interactive mode (invocation example: ./tools/objdiff/objdiff-cli-linux-x86_64 diff -u tmb/file fileReadf__FPcPv), I get a blank display. Menus also appear to generate with blank text:

This happens regardless of which terminal I use (gnome-terminal in the screenshot, but VSCode's integrated terminal produces the same results). My best guess is that this is some system-level incompatibility issue with the TUI libraries objdiff-cli is using.

Some info that will hopefully help:

• Headless Debian 11 (bullseye) server
  • Linux [redacted] 5.10.0-46-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.262-1 (2026-07-31) x86_64 GNU/Linux
• Tested with latest objdiff-cli-linux-x86_64 (v3.8.1)
  • Sanity checked v3.6.0, it also produed the same result.

I'm not sure how to get log output out of objdiff-cli; non-interactive paths seem to ignore my --log-level entirely, while the interactive mode can't output the logs to stdout properly.