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Ratatui – App Showcase

ratatui.rs

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Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#101

Post by diab0lic »

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#102

Post by GaggiX »

sunbum wrote: post #86
RustSupremacist wrote: post #37

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…

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

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

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#103

Post by palata »

nhatcher wrote: post #76
palata wrote: post #75

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.

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

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#104

Post by zimpenfish »

eschaton wrote: post #16
genidoi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/blo…

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.

TurboPascal springs to mind because I know someone who made a video store management system with all kinds of forms and screens (via Turbo Vision[0]) in the early 90s.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#105

Post by Tepix »

RustSupremacist wrote: post #37

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…

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

Haha!

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#106

Post by zimpenfish »

backscratches wrote: post #52
morkalork wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Back in the olden times (2009) I was working for a company trying to sell advertising devices (screens on buses) with a fancy* HTML interface for setting up/controlling/reporting etc. to Titan. Except all the Titan operators hated it because their old system - an old TUI - was about a million times faster for them to use (not just because they were used to it but it didn't require a mouse, etc.) than the fancy* HTML (which was, to be fair, bloody awful but not my fault.)

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#107

Post by adastra22 »

elmt35 wrote: post #87
RustSupremacist wrote: post #37

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…

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.

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#108

Post by adastra22 »

lynndotpy wrote: post #18
omarvanez wrote: post #4

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

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

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#109

Post by adastra22 »

mock-possum wrote: post #57
Szpadel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Sure, but Claude isn't written in Rust and doesn't use Ratatui.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#110

Post by adastra22 »

smartmic wrote: post #67
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sour…

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++.

Even worse than C++? That has never been my experience. I maintain C++ projects that take hours to build from scratch. Most Rust projects I install, even the very big ones, are ~3-5min max.
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