Ratatui: tui-rs revival project | Hacker News Reader

Ratatui: tui-rs revival project

github.com

132 pointsfnordpiglet12 comments

Oh this is great news. The project is fantastic, fdehau (original author/maintainer) created something wonderful. Sad to see he's not able to drive development anymore, but happy to see he's transferred it in a responsible way. Looking forward to see where it goes, and many thanks to Florian!

I do not know rust, but this cannot possibly be as bad as curses :)

I wish there was a simple Text Form Library (not OO) that would read a screen description file and generate/process a 80x24 screen.

Something like: Column,row,length,Text Description,field-type (character, integer, float).

On MS-DOS I had an C compiler that used had a form of printf for this purpose, one line per printf. I used those printfs to kind of create a format text file like above.

TUI is a really great immediate mode library for basic display oriented (not as much on interactivity) applications. It provides non obvious capabilities like charting, etc. The original developer got a real job and it languished for a large part of 2022 and was recently handed over to the community managed by a new GitHub org. There are several other TUI frameworks in rust that are pretty good, but for my work this is the simplest to hack out something that looks really good really fast.

I was trying this with VisiData and the DarkDraw[0] .ddw format, which is JSON and similar structure to what you describe. The problem is that 80x24 is no longer an adequate terminal size, and so simplistic row/column layouts like this can't work to make the form look good. You need "center this text" and a way to put multiple buttons in reasonable places. You could use floats as column/row to indicate fractional position within the window; but then these still need to be the center of the element, and not the start, for it to look good.

[0] https://github.com/devottys/darkdraw

Very glad to see someone stepping up for maintainership. I’ve been working on an app with Cursive but want to replace Cursive with tui and this announcement is reassuring.

What are your thoughts on cursive? I’ve been considering mixing the two in separate screens of the same app but haven’t built the courage to try.

It is pretty easy to get started with Cursive and the tutorials are useful but some widgets also seem buggy (or at least underdocumented). Using large strings with text widgets is very slow with scrolling and reflowing.

I just dove into this project [0] and like these tui libraries. I need to spend more time building here, as i don't know rust much

[0] https://github.com/ndreynolds/ratatouille

Great name

Awesome to see! TUI powers my project, and I'm glad to see it's getting the attention it deserves. Fantastic library that makes building a pretty TUI easy

forked by this french guy[0], very fitting name

[0]: https://github.com/fdehau

great news

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