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Ratatui – App Showcase

ratatui.rs

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Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#151

Post by diab0lic »

zdragnar wrote: post #124
diab0lic wrote: post #101

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,…

I use gitui on Windows and it is amazing, though mostly from a git bash shell.

I’d definitely use something like this too, but don’t have the luxury of telling my end users to.

They’re very nontechnical.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#152

Post by whycombinetor »

I recently asked grok-code-fast-1 to read the SST OpenTUI readme and docs (gave it the github link), and to write an implementation plan for an OpenTUI usage mode for my Rust CLI stdin/stdout app. It fetched the readme. Fetched a couple more doc pages. Response begins "Sure, here's the plan: I'll write a TUI using the Rust package Ratatui..."

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#153

Post by IshKebab »

PoorRustDev wrote: post #135
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…

"GUI situation in Rust is dreadful" I have to agree with this, but for a lot of different things other than GUI as well. My friends all want me to use Rust, but I moved back to C++ after trying to do a lot of different projects in it after finding every crate I needed to be a WIP or abandoned state. There are the massive crates that are super popular of course, but it seems that once you get off the popular beaten pa…

I strongly disagree with this. Obviously Rust hasn't had the decades of life that C/C++ has to give you weird niche libraries, but at this point the Rust crate ecosystem is huge and you have to go fairly niche before you find something where there simply isn't a Rust option. Usually you find something and it's a lot nicer than the C option.

GUI is kind of unique because it's a really hard problem - both a ton of work and also a bit awkward to make ergonomic in Rust.

> last updated 1-3 years ago

That's way too low a bar. I bet most of these niche C libraries that don't have Rust equivalents are similarly slow-moving.

GNU Make regularly goes 4 years without a release but it's still alive.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#154

Post by IshKebab »

adastra22 wrote: post #107
elmt35 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah and even then they have a ton of rendering and performance issues. GUI frameworks are just incredibly hard to do right, and take a ton of time.

I'm betting on Slint. I kind of hated QML but it looks like they have learned a lot of lessons.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#155

Post by cultofmetatron »

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 recently opensourced https://www.gpui.rs/ which is basicly the ui code pulled into its own framework

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#156

Post by jnovek »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #146
kibwen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think my low-key long-term goal is to eventually fully eliminate the mouse while still enjoying the niceties of a modern GUI desktop.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#157

Post by the__alchemist »

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…

It's amusing reading things like this. Meanwhile, we have at least 4 high-quality, practical GUI frameworks to choose from. You want QT in rust? I get that, but that is different from your claim about the state of GUIs in rust.

"I like the A tool in category B. System C doesn't have tool A; system C is dreadful in category B".

I think you could have made the acute part of this argument about GUIs in rust 3 years ago, but not today!

I need to try Slint and GPGUI. I love EGUI, but need to do a proper comparison; could be missing out. This seems to be a concern of a different nature from the one you describe!

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#158

Post by bayesnet »

IshKebab wrote: post #154
adastra22 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah and even then they have a ton of rendering and performance issues. GUI frameworks are just incredibly hard to do right, and take a ton of time. I'm betting on Slint. I kind of hated QML but it looks like they have learned a lot of lessons.

I evaluated gpui for a project I’m working on. While I’ve found the rendering and performance to be great (and actually switched to Zed as my daily driver after playing with it), the (absence of an) accessibility story made me grudgingly just use tauri.

I really want to love gpui and would like to avoid using webviews, the advantage of web-based apps is that accessibility is (relatively) easy to do if you’re attentive to it. At the time I looked at it, gpui did not support screen readers etc at all.

I suppose I understand why they made that decision given their business priorities, but it’s hard for me to tell my vision-impaired friends and colleagues that there’s literally no way for them to use my app.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#159

Post by the__alchemist »

adastra22 wrote: post #107
elmt35 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm glad they contributed something fantastic to the Rust GUI system, but I don't think this is fair: EGUI is fantastic.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#160

Post by norman784 »

adastra22 wrote: post #107
elmt35 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they wanted more control over the GUI, so the best answer to that is build something that you have 100% control over. In one of their first blog posts they explain more in deep the reasons.

> Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework: GPUI. [0]

GPUI is not widely used because they only recently started publishing in crates.io [1] and still AFAIK their documentation is not that great yet, I suppose people will start using soon enough it, I was thinking on using it over Iced that was the other GUI that I feel that have future (because it's used by Cosmic Desktop).

[0] https://zed.dev/blog/videogame [1] https://crates.io/crates/gpui/versions

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