Kruci: Post-mortem of a UI library • Hacker News Board

Re: Kruci: Post-mortem of a UI library

#11

Post by 0x457 » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:02 PM UTC

I think every abandoned TUI framework started with: "why is ratutui does things this way" and ended with "Oh, I get it now".

Problem is when we think UI frameworks we usually run in something that handles a lot of things for us: browser, xorg, wayland etc. You don't get in terminal, so a lot of times TUI frameworks result being a thin abstraction on top of a render-loop.

Then you can't slap something like MVC pattern on it because that isn't how terminal app works. The event handler pretty much has to be global, even if the framework provides some focus management capabilities.

I've tried using different languages and frameworks for thing that I'm working on and pretty much ready to comeback to ratatui.

Re: Kruci: Post-mortem of a UI library

#12

Post by AceJohnny2 » Thu, Sep 04, 2025, 10:25 PM UTC

Absolutely loved this article, which tickles my ADHD brain in all the right ways. I learned that Ratatui does render-diffing, I learned that the Emacs render-diffing ("redisplay") is from 1981, is more sophisticated, and written by Java's creator (James Gosling).

I appreciated the explorations of the complexities of widget rendering, and syntax construction, and explorations of possible solutions and their tradeoffs, with ultimately a reasonable conclusion from the author that it wasn't worth their effort.

This was a great introduction to the design space of TUI libraries. Thanks!

> I think it's okay to both explore and to give up, other paths await.

100%, and thank you for taking us on this enlightening journey. Too much is lost to silent "failure"

Re: Kruci: Post-mortem of a UI library

#13

Post by theamk » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 12:42 AM UTC

A developer that was exposed to Immediate Mode UI only is inventing regular windowing system from the first principles.

Reminds me of Turbo Vision, a TUI toolkit from 1990's: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

It did not have shader nodes, but it run very well on 10MHz computers with a single megabyte of RAM (or less).

Re: Kruci: Post-mortem of a UI library

#14

Post by bbkane » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 5:03 AM UTC

Aside from the excellent technical bits, I really enjoyed the meta "pick your battles" but also "try things and have fun" part at the end. It's how I try to approach side projects too

Re: Kruci: Post-mortem of a UI library

#15

Post by anta40 » Sun, Sep 07, 2025, 12:25 PM UTC

"My programming spare time is dedicated mostly towards kartoffels, a game of mine where you're implementing firmwares for tiny robots"

Whoa a programming game. Interesting :D