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I’m totally ignorant on this and don’t understand. How is WebAssembly helpful for terminal UI apps and why has it been chosen here? Is it mainly for easier cross platform support (with the UI being HTML and then translated for the terminal)? How does it compare on ease of development, testing, maintenance effort, etc., to other terminal UI libraries?

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It's the other way around: there's an existing ratatui library that is pretty nice for making rich terminal UIs, and since ratatui is written in Rust, the easiest way of porting it to the web is through WASM.

Exactly, Ratatui can bring terminal aesthetics to web but it also works the other way around. A lot of the modern terminal aesthetics is inspired by the web. It is not real 80s, more faux 80s.

Ratatui's creator had an excellent talk about this at FOSEM which basically was structured into these two chapters.

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5496-brin...

It's not for terminal UI apps; it's for web apps themed to look like terminal UI apps.

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