Ratatui – App Showcase

by AbuAssar • 9 months ago

771 229 9 months ago

dkdcio2• 9 months ago

the title of this post is odd? it’s a showcase of TUI applications built with this Rust crate — which I am hearing about for the first time, and am interested in. I was expecting a blog post on why Rust is experiencing a TUI revolution or something

dkdcio2• 9 months ago

I am also now curious about alternatives/what differentiates this crate

airstrike• 9 months ago

ratatui has been around for quite a bit. it's what I'll reach out for if I need semi-complex TUIs in Rust fwiw

wrs• 9 months ago

I think they're saying this crate is why Rust is experiencing a TUI revolution.

Charm would probably say the same for Go.

qudat• 9 months ago

Charm was my introduction into the world of ssh apps which prompted me to create https://pico.sh

SSH apps serve a similar UX to web apps which I just think is a great idea for many use cases. Needing to install a cli tool just to upload some files is tedious when you can just use rsync, sftp, piping, or even sshfs

tomhow• 9 months ago

We've updated the title.

Submitters, please remember this from the guidelines:

... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

omarvanez• 9 months ago

I've seen lots of TUIs lately, why is that? What is the renewed interest?

The only places I know of is Awesome TUIs [0] and terminaltrove [1]

I can also see that Ratatui has an awesome list too [2].

[0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

[1] https://terminaltrove.com/

[2] https://github.com/ratatui-org/awesome-ratatui

morkalork• 9 months ago

IMO it's like seeing kids bust out disposable kodak cameras at the bar: generational nostalgia

baq• 9 months ago

TUIs being designed by engineers for engineers make them rather timeless. Extra points for being keyboard-first: lots of modern GUI tools don’t even consider the keyboard for anything other than text input, to the point that even tab order is broken, if it works at all, or the escape key closes multiple stacked modal windows, or enter doesn’t submit the dialog, or…

backscratches2• 9 months ago

TUIs work better than GUIs. So much more powerful with so many less resources.

CSSer3• 9 months ago

That's a big question. I think TUIs are great for glue processes, and it doesn't hurt when they look pretty. They're also excellent first projects with composable interfaces. Shell code is such a pain. It's quick and dirty, but there are a lot of footguns. The main challenge is reducing the friction of making a TUI to the point where it's easy to execute an idea, and a lot of frameworks do this really well. Add the proliferation of LLMs on top, and maybe that could explain it?

DC-3• 9 months ago

The terminal remains an extremely compelling computing environment in spite of its limitations and fifty years of technical debt. As anachronistic as arcane escape codes and box drawing characters seem in $CURRENT_YEAR, the fact remains that nothing has arisen to fill its niche.

genidoi• 9 months ago

TUI libraries have sufficiently abstracted away the low-level quirks of terminal rendering that the terminal has become something like a canvas[0] available in the IDE with no extensions. This is quite a nice DevX if you want to display the state of an app that does something to data, without writing the necessary plumbing to pipe that data to a browser and render it.

[0] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples...

eschaton• 9 months ago

They did this in the 1970s and 1980s too, then they were called “forms libraries” but were often full application frameworks in ways that would be familiar to modern developers of native graphical apps.

flomo• 9 months ago

The low-level terminal stuff is still grody as hell. Years ago, HN had some blogposts from someone who was rethinking the whole stack, but I dunno what happened to that project. If people really like TUIs, eventually they're going to stop doing the 1980s throback stuff.

lynndotpy• 9 months ago

In addition to other comments, it's the only real way to make a usable GUI-like experience over SSH.

vostok• 9 months ago

I've generally had good experiences with the various compressed X11-like tools. One example is x2go, but there are a few.

MangoToupe• 9 months ago

You can also serve a window server over ssh

adastra228• 9 months ago

X11 transports just fine over SSH. You can have a window in your own desktop that is drawn by a process running remotely, and it looks and feels just like it is local.

webnrrd2k• 9 months ago

I think that a lot of people here at HN have had bad web interfaces and GUIs inflicted on them for a long time, that a TUI is a welcome change and a big improvement. TUIs are limited, which make it hard to create great interfaces; but those limits also make it hard to create really bad interfaces. Also the TUI is genuinely good at simple-to-moderate complexity software. For an example, try out Midnight Commander.

laserbeam• 9 months ago

What is the renewed interest?

We just don’t have good desktop GUI platforms anymore. Qt and GTK are massive beasts, Windows changes theirs every 4 years (and no one wants to be tied to a single platform anyway), we don’t want to deal with Electron, and writing your own GUI from scratch is hard.

Terminals just got good lately and it’s way easier to make something higher quality in them than as a GUI. It’s just too hard to make a good small desktop app.

It’s the same reason why it’s easier to make something look great with LEGO than if you want to mold clay. I’d also wager that devs today on average know more about good UX than devs did back in the 80s when clunky terminal apps used to be made.

dualogy3• 9 months ago

Godot is neat for personal tool-making where I just need a small gui with basic controls and can express the whole proggie in just GdScript (API has sufficient OS interactions for most needs), I just whip it out for those when I otherwise don't really use it anymore, just keeping it around for that. Stuff like that: https://postimg.cc/VJc0pWbB

orbital-decay3• 9 months ago

They're easier to program and seamlessly integrate into the terminal. That's basically it, other than that they're worse than normal GUIs. Also, GUI frameworks aren't that mature in Rust in particular.

nurettin• 9 months ago

I don't care much about forms and windows in the command line (I've had enough of turbo vision back in the 90s), but I don't think I am alone in wanting to see some progress bars and stats for long running processes. So 2% of these libraries is actually pretty useful.

tptacek• 9 months ago

High-level languages that compile to single binaries, and very good TUI frameworks (maybe inspired by Python Textual?) for them.

travisgriggs• 9 months ago

What is the renewed interest?

For me, often, it’s an escape for a GUI world taken over by out-of-control “design” tenets. I value good Ux design concerns, but often working with designers lately feels bureaucratic, at times cargo culting, and overly spacious.

It’s like a graphical form of “I didn’t have time to give you a short answer, so I gave you a long one instead”. TUIs force a paucity that often makes for a nice information/pixels ratio.

alwillis• 9 months ago

I've seen lots of TUIs lately, why is that? What is the renewed interest?

A few reasons:

- for the most part TUI apps are cross-platform: macOS, Linux, BSD, Windows

- they cut down on context switching. If you're already in the terminal, you shouldn't have to switch to a GUI app to check on something.

- Today's terminal emulators—Ghostty, WezTerm, Kitty, iTerm, Alacrity, etc.—are fast and capable with GPU acceleration, 24-bit color support running on high resolution displays. It makes for a compelling platform to code for.

- Anecdotally lots of developers are spending less time in IDEs and more time in the terminal using Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, etc.

positron26• 9 months ago

Unrelated to the article, a lot of my millennials could see web and then mobile coming, focused on web & mobile, and as a result just weren't really participating in C and C++ development. We used terminal applications leftover from peak GNU.

When Rust came along and presented a career opportunity, terminal apps was a great way to get into it and filled a gap in a lot of people's skill sets. Even when building GUI apps in Rust, your first entry point is a CLI usually.

We took our UX thinking from web & mobile and remixed it with Rust and new ideas came out. Turns out "If it aint broke don't fix it" for two decades can build up a lot of evolutionary pressure.

Szpadel• 9 months ago

i think this might be caused by codex. it's open source, many people use it and it uses ratatui. People check how it is implemented and discover ratatui.

I believe this might be current most popular application using this library.

I'm surprised it isn't included in this showcase

mock-possum• 9 months ago

Or Claude. There are more than a few developers on my team that prefer terminal interface for their codegen chatbots.

joshka2• 9 months ago

Good idea. Fixing this in https://github.com/ratatui/ratatui-website/pull/979 Disclaimer, I work on Codex since about a month ago.

I used codex to write the VHS script, which runs codex to generate a Ratatui app, and then then used codex to add this to the website. It's codapodes all the way down.

serial_dev• 9 months ago

My theory, web apps are extremely bloated and slow, teams behind it always “optimize” and switch things up, and desktop apps are usually just wrapped web apps. TUI developers don’t mind settling and not always messing up the product and they keep the TUI “lean and mean”. Some users appreciate fast, simple UIs and they don’t want to be constantly A/B tested on only for the core experience to break all the time.

mendelmaleh• 9 months ago

The main reason for me is simple keyboard navigation. I don't want to click through links and menus, I don't want to use the mouse at all. I think that's also why tiling window managers are popular again.

J_Shelby_J• 9 months ago

Idk, I see it them all the time on the rust subreddit. Like, cool, but my friend, I have like ten brain cells and all of them are in overdrive. I’m not going to remember I have your TUI app installed AND remember the commands to make it work. If I have to use a CLI I just save the command I need in a text file so I don’t have to look them up. Just give me ang button any where. I’m not picky.

pixelready• 9 months ago

Yeah I think it’s the software equivalent of “go back to the land” type movements. Resurgence of Linux tiling window managers, NeoVim, TUIs. Everything in web and Electron land feels busy, attention grabbing, and bloated. Heck, even VSCode’s defaults are a kind of cluttered.

I for one love the tranquility of a dark mode terminal and find it quite pleasant with a nice nerd font, a pretty color scheme, a single high resolution monitor and an ergonomic keyboard. I feel much more connected to the code or data I’m interacting with in that space. Trying to live there as much as I can lately. JiraTui has been great for preventing context switching at work.

the_gipsy3• 9 months ago

TUIs have the constraint that they don't have a mouse (or is optional at best).

This means almost all TUI programs can be entirely keyboard driven.

Almost all GUI programs fail at this, in other words, it's extremely likely that at some point, something that requires a mouse action will interrupt.

CSSer3• 9 months ago

Some of the most interesting projects here have the worst installation stories.It's sort of tilting at windmills to not acknowledge that people are going to mostly install through package managers for their platform by advertising it as such. I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with building from source. On the contrary, I think it's fantastic as many targets are supported here as there are! I think it's a shame more people aren't discovering them is all.

AceJohnny2• 9 months ago

Rust, following Go's footsteps, has made it very easy to distribute-and-compile from source. They've taken all the pain out of the compiling-from-source pipeline, through "go build" or "cargo build"

Meanwhile, distributions sometimes maintain their plodding rate at package updates (usually handled by distribution volunteers, not the original program's developers), which was developed in an era when building from source was a tedious process where the distribution volunteers provided value.

In effect, build-from-source has taken over "just use the distribution package".

CSSer3• 9 months ago

Okay, but where do you put it? I mean, yes, I know there's /usr/local/bin and /opt/bin, but why do I have to compile then mv it myself? It's a small paper cut. Does cargo or go have a global build command? That would be a nice all-in-one. And why should I have to download the source code if, honestly, I don't care as long as it works? Nah, I don't think build from source has taken over at all. It's 2025 and I use a package manager (or three) on every major operating system across multiple languages. It's because, as a vendor experience, I can one-line and use just about anything.

smartmic• 9 months ago

The reason I was put off by Rust was compiling from source. I experimented with a ports collection package management system similar to those used in BSD a while ago, and every time a Rust program needed to be compiled, I could go to sleep; no, basically rendering the system unusable. It was like the dependency abyss of NPM combined with the worst possible compile times, even worse than C++.

skydhash• 9 months ago

The reason for the rate of updates is isially for one reason: Trust and Stability. Instead of trusting a myriad people all over the world to do their job well, I trust one team to ensure that all the tools I need do run well.

And in the Unix world, build from source can be pretty easy. When it’s hard, it’s usually the project’s fault (Firefox, Electron,..).

mariusor• 9 months ago

In effect, build-from-source has taken over "just use the distribution package".

Not in the real world, where most of the useful software is not in fact written in Rust, nor Go for that matter.

Jaxan2• 9 months ago

Aren’t all of these in a sense personal projects? If it works for the developer, that’s enough.

nullbyte808• 9 months ago

Very dope. I really like dua as my mac only has 256 GB.

siavosh• 9 months ago

What is the best / most popular / user friendly terminal http client I can replace postman with. Has a history I can search, save favorites, secure etc.

seabrookmx• 9 months ago

I also have this question!

I starred Posting[1] but haven't yet got around to trying it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40926211

Edit: here's another one: https://github.com/LucasPickering/slumber

bitexploder• 9 months ago

I like smaller more focused tools on the terminal. You can make these all work together pretty reasonably with a little glue. Hurl, mitmproxy, httpie with http-prompt. I tend to prefer mitmproxy sessions and massaging that with Python/curl as needed for repeating and tweaking. User friendly is relative, but these tools work well. Python for tweaking http streams in mitmproxy is powerful and rather friendly for what you get in return. Mitmproxy lets you easily save flows with a bit of Puthon glue to output httpie commands giving history, and you can save mitmproxy sessions.

tcoff91• 9 months ago

Kulala nvim plugin or emacs rest client

esafak• 9 months ago

xh has sessions. https://github.com/ducaale/xh

esseph• 9 months ago

https://posting.sh/

tonypapousek• 9 months ago

Most popular? https://justuse.org/curl/

ModernMech3• 9 months ago

Ratatui is neat but the way it's architected, you need to take on third party dependencies for each individual widget. And we're talking basic things like spinners, checkboxes, text areas, etc. -- there aren't too many widgets built into ratatui itself. I didn't like the idea of taking all that on so instead I went with something more handrolled.

speed_spread3• 9 months ago

That's pretty much how I would expect a UI framework to work. As long as each widget class only depends on the UI base classes the dependencies should be small and grow proportionally to the number of widgets types used by the app. This should also being much less version churn than a big central library including everything.

ModernMech3• 9 months ago

That's a good point! Some sort of widget framework is important for extensions. But I think my issue is that there are only a dozen included widgets, so very basic things are left to third parties. Most mature UI libraries would include all the basic things, and leave a widget interface for uncommon extensions, not rely on third parties for basic features.

With the path they've chosen, it may mean less version churn, but the other side is you've gotta wait for each widget author to upgrade their widgets when Ratatui upgrades. This can lead to a situation where some widgets upgrade, some don't, and you're left either on the lower version with unpatched issues, or the newer version missing widgets.

I much prefer the design of web-sys and js-sys, where all the features are included and gated behind feature flags.

bbkane• 9 months ago

Rust has a culture of using lots of dependencies in general. I'm not super happy about this. I'd prefer a few larger dependencies, but most of the time I don't have the time/energy/talent to rebuild (or even vendor) these dependency trees

ModernMech3• 9 months ago

I understand that and am usually comfortable with it, but as far as Rust goes this goes too far for me. I'm fine taking on lots of deps for a big feature like Ratatui. But taking on a new dep for each widget seemed excessive.

mbm• 9 months ago

Ratatui is awesome! Just built a little chat client with it, tons of fun.

https://terma.mattmay.dev/

godelski7• 9 months ago

I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal.

Is anyone working on this?

With the speed terminals are and support for graphics through things like sixel and shaders I'd love to have a browser even if I couldn't do videos. Even if it was like viewing most pages in reader mode.

I'm not sure some big companies would be happy about that though since it likely would mean you could do things like ad blocking more easily. But maybe you could get them on board if you pitched it as a browser for LLMs. Something something it's a native interface for them. ;)

I know there's some browsers but things like W3M, Lynx, or *links* are... rough... definitely not of the quality we're seeing elsewhere in the current TUI revolution.

fruitworks• 9 months ago

the cursive tui library does some html rendering

https://sr.ht/~ireas/cursive-markup-rs/

the whole cursive library strikes me as very html-like in layout

awesomeusername• 9 months ago

Browsh [0] - it runs firefox headless, and renders everything to ascii in the terminal

It's glorious

[0] https://www.brow.sh/

be_erik• 9 months ago

I use this one pretty often. It’s great. https://chawan.net/

godelski7• 9 months ago

This actually looks pretty reasonable. Thanks! I'll definitely be giving it a try

littlestymaar2• 9 months ago

I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal.

You can already do this, since the 90s: Lynx[1] and w3m[2] have both existed for more than three decades at this point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m

jasonjayr• 9 months ago

ELinks is the TUI browser I've used since .... forever.

https://github.com/rkd77/elinks

godelski7• 9 months ago

I'm sorry, did you even read my comment?

I mentioned those by name...

  >> I know there's some browsers but things like W3M, Lynx, or *links* are... rough...

ororoo• 9 months ago

I believe they wants text browser written specifically in rust, and does not want to touch any software written in filth like c/c++.

gf0002• 9 months ago

But.. why? Like I do get the occasional need where it's easier to just see an html page in the terminal, but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks with a huge amount of overhead, over having a real buffer and just writing pixels to it, with actual hardware acceleration?

selfhoster11• 9 months ago

SSH access over a slow network connection?

actionfromafar• 9 months ago

Character based interfaces are just nice, IMHO. The Borland IDE was the pinnacle of dev interfaces IMHO. It updated to have modern language server support etc would be my dream dev environment. It would be cool to see how far a compliant web browser could be taken in text mode. It's really sad that most terminals don't have proper image support, btw.

Edit: A comment here linked to https://www.brow.sh/ It looks amazing.

godelski7• 9 months ago

  > but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks

Have you used a terminal in the last 5 years? We got graphics and everything now[0]

  > huge amount of overhead

A... terminal... with... large overhead? Surely you're joking. Have you met any gui app? Microsoft word takes a few gigs. Have you seen electron apps like Spotify or slack? My fucking mail client takes over half a gig and neomutt takes almost nothing.

Either you're making numbers up or we live in different realities

  > actual hardware acceleration?

Hardware acceleration has existed for years...

Maybe stop making assumptions and check out what terminals can do. They've come a long way since the 80's. I'd suggest starting with something like ghostty.

[0] https://notcurses.com/

globular-toast• 9 months ago

Why would you want to live in a terminal? That's extremely limiting. What you really want is Emacs. Emacs has both a TUI web browser (EWW) and info browser already. You can even run vim in Emacs if you want, either the "real" (and inferior) thing via vterm, or use evil mode or another modal mode for Emacs like god mode.

vinceguidry2• 9 months ago

I wanted to like modal editing in Emacs. But I had to come to terms with the fact that it's always going to be a kludge. Boon is the best I've seen it get, but when I wanted to improve it, I realized it would be less work over the long run to just make my own text editor, though that's mostly because my chosen language, ruby, just doesn't have very good tooling yet.

If you're willing to live in elisp, Emacs is amazing. I'm not, I'm always going to want to do it with ruby, and well, Emacs doesn't let you do that.

godelski7• 9 months ago

Probably not as limited as you think

https://notcurses.com/

miguel_martin• 9 months ago

Not rust, but check out nimwave: https://github.com/ansiwave/nimwave

mike31fr• 9 months ago

Carbonyl looked promising but unfortunately is not maintained anymore: https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

RustSupremacist• 9 months ago

People keep asking why TUIs in Rust and the answer is because the GUI situation in Rust is dreadful: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...

Rust is simply not meant for GUI-based data design but I still want Qt in Rust. That's it. Not QML or Slint. No markup at all. None of the immediate mode things. No other languages. Definitely not GTK. I'm worried it will never happen for Rust and it will be such a missed opportunity.

goku12• 9 months ago

You basically preempted nearly every single option, including an incumbent one. I don't believe it's fair to judge Rust based on its compatibility with Qt alone - something written in C++. Nothing against C++, but it's harder to get C++ and Rust to work together. You haven't addressed Iced yet, though going by your requirements, you're unlikely to be satisfied by it as well. Iced is not there yet, but it is the native GUI toolkit of the Cosmic desktop.

dancemethis• 9 months ago

I kept forgetting Narrator is a Windows program, and the post read like the author was referring to the "Narrator voice in their head" while testing the UIs.

It made the post more amusing, actually. I sighed when I saw "Windows Narrator" suddenly.

ogoffart• 9 months ago

Author of one of these "markup"-based toolkits here. I believe that Rust might not be the best language syntax to express UI. I am curious why you are so strongly against using a DSL.

This topic comes up often, so I wrote a blog post explaining why I think a DSL is a good fit: https://slint.dev/blog/domain-specific-language-vs-imperativ...

OtomotO• 9 months ago

I'd like to have non-imperative gui code in Rust.

Why Rust? Because I like its power and with recent developments such as subsecond the compile times are absolutely negligible.

vinceguidry2• 9 months ago

When I went to go look for a platform to implement a personal text editor on, I somewhat quickly settled on the vt100 terminal api with kitty extensions, particularly its keyboard protocol. Everything else locks you into, not only a language, everybody codes frameworks these days, nobody writes apis, but also what's essentially already a legacy solution, a framework is going to get updates at the speed of the developer's passion.

Whereas when kovid made the kitty terminal protocol, it got implemented by the next 3 or so new terminal emulators. You don't get this kind of modernization from any other UI solution save browsers. And no way do I want to do web development for my own stuff. I suppose I could target Dillo or something like Servo, but I'd be more inclined to consume the base X11 protocol, as Vidar H did.

My Ruby terminal protocol implementation has smooth abstractions from methods performing the bare VT control calls up to semantic methods with better naming, to flexible and extensible text field abstractions. All the concerns are separated nicely and Ruby lets me scope everything just right, so I can call a debugger anywhere as the necessary logic is scoped module-wide.

I simply cannot imagine having any kind of fun doing this in a static compiled language. And I'll be able to build on top of this to make things that aren't editors.

lenkite2• 9 months ago

Doesn't https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component tick all your boxes ?

Narishma3• 9 months ago

Does it work without a modern GPU?

sunbum• 9 months ago

Why does that link redirect to a fart sound hosted on Wikipedia?

heavensteeth• 9 months ago

The author doesn't like HN.

bakugo• 9 months ago

A quick glance at the website in question suggests that its owner may not be particularly mentally mature.

GaggiX• 9 months ago

I find it always hilarious when websites check the referer for HN and do some random shit. "Alive internet theory"

SpikedCola• 9 months ago

  // Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce
  // Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life
  // Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clanâ€™s wisdom be yours:
  //
  //     Never read Hacker News
  // - Aphyr, "Hexing the technical interview"
  if (document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")) {
      document.location = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Human_fart.wav"
  }

> https://www.boringcactus.com/assets/site.js

elmt35• 9 months ago

Zed (https://zed.dev) is a GUI built in rust. Im not an expert in GUI building so maybe I'm wrong and they used a separate language for the GUI.

stefanka• 9 months ago

They use rust for the gpu

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/crates/gpui

See the discussion on a collection of elements ontop

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45719004

adastra228• 9 months ago

They use Rust, but they basically reinvented the wheel for everything they did, because the existing GUI stuff in the rust ecosystem sucked so badly it wasn't worth fixing.

Which is great, Zed's stack is pretty damn good. But like anything not yet widely used outside of its original use case, it can be rough around the edges, and just plain doesn't support anything that is not needed by Zed.

cultofmetatron• 9 months ago

they recently opensourced https://www.gpui.rs/ which is basicly the ui code pulled into its own framework

weinzierl• 9 months ago

Apart from what you said about the GUI situation in Rust (which I disagree with) I think TUI's have their niche.

I think writing a useful GUI has considerable overhead no matter which technology you use. In addition they cause other difficulties, like testability, i18n, l10n and accessability.

This is why people often resort to command line tools, rightfully so. There are cases, however, where a CLI won't cut it and I believe TUI's are a nice and lean solution that sits right between CLI and full-blown GUI and isn't going anywhere.

Jaxan2• 9 months ago

In addition they cause other difficulties, like testability, i18n, l10n and accessability.

Most TUIs don’t have these either. So I don’t see this as a difference between TUI/GUI. If you want to make a GUI and want to ignore these things, you are free to do so.

miki1232112• 9 months ago

To be fair, TUIs are strictly worse accessibility-wise than GUIs.

There's no standard to communicate TUI semantics to assistive technology, and whatever few standards actually exist (like using the cursor to navigate menus instead of some custom highlight) aren't followed.

With GUIs, those standards exist, and are at least somewhat implemented by all major (non-Rust)UI frameworks.

bmitc2• 9 months ago

I think writing a useful GUI has considerable overhead no matter which technology you use.

I find egui far easier than Ratatui.

Tepix• 9 months ago

"Maybe one day an AI bro who pays for Twitter will contribute something positive to society, but this is not that day."

Haha!

linhns• 9 months ago

Given Qt consists of hardcore lovers of old C++, this is unlikely to happen in this generation.

Kelteseth• 9 months ago

They literally announced that they are working on it: https://www.qt.io/qt-bridges

kibwen4• 9 months ago

No, the people making TUIs in Rust are making TUIs because they love TUIs, and because Ratatui is pretty delightful. The state of GUI frameworks in Rust is irrelevant for this purpose, because even if there existed your ideal of Qt in Rust (putting aside the debatable notion that Qt is some sort of pinnacle of design), the people making TUIs wouldn't care, because that's not what they want to make.

hombre_fatal4• 9 months ago

Also once your workflow is increasingly keyboard based (like when using a tiled window manager), TUIs just make more sense.

Every GUI I replace with a TUI is one less flow-breaking obstacle where I have to suddenly reach for the mouse.

berkes• 9 months ago

Anecdotal evidence here. My use-case needs some UI, but a full blown GUI is way, way overkill.

I am building tooling around "Verifiable Credentials" (the W3C standard, OpenID standard, and all the standards around and below it).

So me and my co-workers need tools to check JWTs, resolve DIDs, generate Proof of Possession, .well-known contents and services discovery, do OpenId Connect flows, interpret "offer requests", "presentation requests", QR-codes, etc. It started as a bucket of random commandline things that random devs whipped up when needed (in typescript, python, bash, rust, some PHP), and now slowly consolidated into a consistent "toolkit". I am currently still porting most of these tools to Rust and make their CLI interface and IO consistent.

But from there I'll be adding a TUI very quickly.

By no means meant as "end-user" software - those exist and called "wallets". But for developers and devops working in this niche. These don't need a GUI. I'd even wager these users don't want a GUI but prefer a TUI, but in any case, the TUI is just so much easier and more accessible for me as a dev that it's the choice between a TUI+CLI or no UI, just CLI.

speed_spread3• 9 months ago

I think it's pretty normal to have a language dedicated to the UI structure. It should be declarative for easy machine manipulation with a WYSIWYG editor and could be translated to code before compilation.

My reference in this are Delphi .dfm files, which you rarely have to edit manually because they're handled by the IDE form builder. It is still a fantastic IDE to build native UI apps and I don't see a reason why Rust couldn't be used the same way.

PoorRustDev• 9 months ago

"GUI situation in Rust is dreadful"

I have to agree with this, but for a lot of different things other than GUI as well. My friends all want me to use Rust, but I moved back to C++ after trying to do a lot of different projects in it after finding every crate I needed to be a WIP or abandoned state. There are the massive crates that are super popular of course, but it seems that once you get off the popular beaten path the available crates becomes far worse than any other language I have ever used.

Of course comparing Rust to something like Python or C++ is unfair to Rust, since Rust has had less time to develop those packages, but I think its more about the community at this point. I just don't see any enthusiasm for working on crates/frameworks. Most of the time when I find a crate I need, its sitting at version 0.3.0, last updated 1-3 years ago, with the documentation simply stating "Reimplementation of X in Rust, go read X's C++ documentation on how to use."

IshKebab2• 9 months ago

I strongly disagree with this. Obviously Rust hasn't had the decades of life that C/C++ has to give you weird niche libraries, but at this point the Rust crate ecosystem is huge and you have to go fairly niche before you find something where there simply isn't a Rust option. Usually you find something and it's a lot nicer than the C option.

GUI is kind of unique because it's a really hard problem - both a ton of work and also a bit awkward to make ergonomic in Rust.

last updated 1-3 years ago

That's way too low a bar. I bet most of these niche C libraries that don't have Rust equivalents are similarly slow-moving.

GNU Make regularly goes 4 years without a release but it's still alive.

the__alchemist5• 9 months ago

I'm going to agree with you here. I love rust, but this is a big down side. I have to do so much ecosystem building and low level stuff because the libs available don't exist, or are not in a suitably usable state.

bmitc2• 9 months ago

Do you happen to have any particular examples?

claudiug• 9 months ago

there is this new library: https://longbridge.github.io/gpui-component/

athoneycutt• 9 months ago

What about Iced or libcosmic (based on Iced)?

WD-422• 9 months ago

The linked post is worthless. It’s a bunch of whining about how various rust stuff doesn’t work correctly on Windows “The most popular OS for developers.” Nobody cares.

the__alchemist5• 9 months ago

It's amusing reading things like this. Meanwhile, we have at least 4 high-quality, practical GUI frameworks to choose from. You want QT in rust? I get that, but that is different from your claim about the state of GUIs in rust.

"I like the A tool in category B. System C doesn't have tool A; system C is dreadful in category B".

I think you could have made the acute part of this argument about GUIs in rust 3 years ago, but not today!

I need to try Slint and GPGUI. I love EGUI, but need to do a proper comparison; could be missing out. This seems to be a concern of a different nature from the one you describe!

dlivingston2• 9 months ago

IMO, traditional GUI frameworks in Rust (like Qt) are difficult for the same reason that game engines in Rust are difficult: cyclical references. A window might contain a group box which contains a text field and a button. All of these are (direct or indirect) children of the window, but all children also hold a reference to their parent. Qt's signal-slot mechanism would also be difficult to implement in Rust.

k_bx2• 9 months ago

Why not just use Arc and clone the cyclical references as much as you want `button: RefCell<Option<Arc<Button>>>`?

vablings2• 9 months ago

I just completely disagree. We have Slint, Dioxus, Tauri, Egui (best imo). If Dioxus blitz renderer takes off them it will vastly better than 99% of options for other languages

krzyk• 9 months ago

People keep asking why TUIs in Rust

Because it is quite easy to do.

There are also TUIs in other languages, just Rust is more cool.

junon• 9 months ago

Rust is simply not meant for GUI-based data design

It's no less or more equipped than C or C++, so not really sure what to make of this comment given the username lol.

k_bx2• 9 months ago

Cosmic DE is written in Rust, it's nice and is a good proof you can do GUI in Rust quite well

Diti• 9 months ago

Wrong link? My browser (Firefox on iOS) redirects me to a fart sound media [1], and going back in history takes me back to here.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Human_fa...

renewiltord• 9 months ago

Oh good collection. This is good. Found lots of good tools here.

discoinverno2• 9 months ago

Shameless plug of my TUI game, also built with Ratatui

https://github.com/ricott1/rebels-in-the-sky

benrutter• 9 months ago

P2P terminal game about spacepirates playing basketball across the galaxy

Absolutely fantastic description right there.

seabass• 9 months ago

Looks really cool! Love the artwork. Right now the video in the readme doesn’t render on github, though. I had to manually download the mp4 from your demo folder to view it.

gausswho• 9 months ago

I don't know what I just got into, but I love it. Reminds me of Hattrick (the decades old soccer management sim) but with more elbow grease and panache. If you're even remotely interested, just ssh in and you're off to the races.

BTW, the video at the top of the repo readme won't open on any device I own.

discoinverno2• 9 months ago

Ja, I know, it's a coin flip, sometimes it works :( I added a youtube link just below it, it's the demo

nhatcher4• 9 months ago

(shameless plug) I don't know if anyone would be interested in taking this but I have what I think is a really nice project. Integrating this;

https://github.com/ironcalc/TironCalc

Into the main repo :

https://github.com/ironcalc/ironcalc

Now, I'm not 100% convinced ratatui is the way to go after seeing what the folks of Microsoft did with edit.

Anyhow, I think TironCalc is a great open source project to work with Rust and Ratatui.

jossephus01• 9 months ago

Nice. It would be also cool if they add 'cargo install %tool%' commands for each one.

vablings2• 9 months ago

This is basically how dioxus 0.7.0 works. You can download components, and they will automatically add the source to your source and then you can just freely use them

https://dioxuslabs.com/components/

submeta• 9 months ago

Wow, I did not know that some of my most loved apps in terminal are written in Rust: yazi, atuin, bottom, isn't fzf also written in Rust? And today I learned about some more I want to explore: csvlens, bandwhich, dua, material, oha.

I find these apps so increadibly useful, I almost want to learn Rust :D

timeon• 9 months ago

fzf is Go. There is Skim, which is done in Rust.

eric-burel• 9 months ago

Would be more and more useful to have terminal CLI utilities like running a given prompt or agent over a folder. I'd use that for auditing legal compliance for some projects.

whycombinetor2• 9 months ago

Don't all the major coding agents have CLI mode now? Cline CLI. Opencode CLI. Codex CLI. Gemini CLI. Claude Code CLI. Etc.

pjmlp• 9 months ago

So many MS-DOS application memories comming back, really don't get it in the age of cheap graphics.

Need to dust off my Turbo Vision and Clipper projects.

nobleach• 9 months ago

CA Clipper database stuff was my jam! I only wish I had gotten into Turbo Vision. I used to watch my users fly through db apps filling out forms, hititng TAB between fields. There was just something so natural about it. The first app we ported to a web-based solution was really painful to watch.

palata2• 9 months ago

I tried Ratatui for a small app. I just needed a textbox, and I copied an example from the tutorial. When typing (quickly), the CPU usage was crazy. I was expecting something like 0% CPU (it's just typing text, a similar app in Go uses nothing) but it was using like 8% CPU.

I would guess I was doing something wrong, but it was really running an example from the official website. So I gave up on Ratatui.

nhatcher4• 9 months ago

Hmm, that sounds bad. Were you running the debug build? Like just running 'cargo run'?

palata2• 9 months ago

First in debug, then I built in release to see if that changed something, but it didn't.

I see that there are some related discussions on the github: https://github.com/ratatui/ratatui/discussions/1927. Not sure if there is a solution though.

nhatcher4• 9 months ago

Related from yesterday:

Bluetui – A TUI for managing Bluetooth on Linux

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45817114 https://github.com/pythops/bluetui

vinhnx• 9 months ago

I’ve been experimenting with a coding agent project [0], and ratatui-rs became my framework of choice for building its first TUI. [1] The framework now ships with native list view support and improved terminal capabilities, including smoother mouse interaction and text selection.

[0] https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode

[1] https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui

thomasfl• 9 months ago

I want a small wrapper around slumber so it can take the same command line arguments and options as curl. I now there are several attempts at making a graphical UI for curl, but slumber has a very nice and simple cli.

diab0lic2• 9 months ago

How is the Windows support in Ratatui? I recently developed something with a different library (also crossterm based) only to discover it did not work very well for my windows users and ended up having to build a GUI with Iced.

There’s a very real chance I just missed some initialization code that Ratatui might do out of the box that the other library was not.

Edit: Issues experienced by windows users were no colors, terminal flashing on every keypress, all keypresses registered as double.

Edit2: This miniature rant inspired me to go back to the commit and submit a patch to eliminate the event reporting on KeyUp and enable terminal colors.

zdragnar• 9 months ago

I use gitui on Windows and it is amazing, though mostly from a git bash shell.

diab0lic2• 9 months ago

I’d definitely use something like this too, but don’t have the luxury of telling my end users to.

They’re very nontechnical.

the_gipsy3• 9 months ago

Shameless plug:

https://github.com/benjajaja/mdfried/

Markdown is really cool in the sense that you can still look at the raw text and read it easily. But one thing that always made me load up .md files in the browser was that it's just much easier to read when the headers are bigger.

So I wrote a markdown viewer that renders the headers as images. You need to configure your font once for it to work, can't really detect the terminal font. It obviously also renders inline images, which was another reason to use the browser.

And then, Kitty developed the novelty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol (I think it's now also implemented in Ghostty), which means we can skip the text-to-image processing and directly leverage that protocol.

unmotivated-hmn• 9 months ago

This is very cool, thanks for sharing! p.s. I don't think Ghostty implements this protocol (yet?)

the_gipsy3• 9 months ago

You're right, I think I misheard that on some YouTube video. There's a discussion on the ghostty repo, and someone said presenterm had something though.

The good thing is that the image renderer definitely works on ghostty!

Derpdiherp• 9 months ago

I began learning Rust in my spare time - as a C++ dev it seemed like the right thing to do. I ended up using Ratatui for a hangman implementation. I really liked using it, I ended up with an itch to make an oldschool roguelike with it. Perhaps some day I'll carry on and do it.

swiftcoder• 9 months ago

There are some truly gorgeous TUIs in that list

Thom2503• 9 months ago

The dutch teletekst has a SSH interface, which is also made with ratatui [1].

ssh teletekst.nl

[1] https://tweakers.net/geek/237754/nos-maakt-teletekst-beschik...

whycombinetor2• 9 months ago

I recently asked grok-code-fast-1 to read the SST OpenTUI readme and docs (gave it the github link), and to write an implementation plan for an OpenTUI usage mode for my Rust CLI stdin/stdout app. It fetched the readme. Fetched a couple more doc pages. Response begins "Sure, here's the plan: I'll write a TUI using the Rust package Ratatui..."

alfiedotwtf• 9 months ago

Ratatui is awesome, but I haven’t found a widget library and event loop that I like, so had to roll my own.

Any recommendations for something that’s ergonomic to use and looks nice?

Ratatui – App Showcase

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