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Ratatui – App Showcase

ratatui.rs

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Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#141

Post by andrewl-hn »

Kelteseth wrote: post #116
linhns wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

There's already a very good bridge for Qt: https://kdab.github.io/cxx-qt/book/

In the linked article the author had trouble building Qt for windows and because they wanted to go through 40+ GUI libraries they skipped it instead of pushing through. That's why it doesn't show up in final short-list of good options.

In my books (writing Rust since 2013, but haven't done any GUI work in it), Qt and Slint are the best options out there.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#143

Post by ModernMech »

bbkane wrote: post #139
ModernMech wrote: post #21

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.

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

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#144

Post by athoneycutt »

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…

What about Iced or libcosmic (based on Iced)?

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#145

Post by timeon »

submeta wrote: post #69

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

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

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#146

Post by hombre_fatal »

kibwen wrote: post #127
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…

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.

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#147

Post by ModernMech »

speed_spread wrote: post #138
ModernMech wrote: post #21

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.

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.

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#148

Post by surajrmal »

adastra22 wrote: post #110
smartmic wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you building in release or debug? Do you have lto enabled? Rust compile time is absolutely worse than c++, and I'm not sure many in the community would disagree. You need to aggressively split large crates up to make it sane. A lot of this comes down to the fact the crate is the compilation unit rather than individual files.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#149

Post by nobleach »

pjmlp wrote: post #74

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.

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#150

Post by WD-42 »

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…

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.
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