Ratatui is awesome, but I haven’t found a widget library and event loop that I like, so had to roll my own.
Any recommendations for something that’s ergonomic to use and looks nice?
Ratatui – App Showcase
161–170 of 238 posts
Re: Ratatui – App Showcase
#162People 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…
IMO, traditional GUI frameworks in Rust (like Qt) are difficult for the same reason that game engines in Rust are difficult: cyclical references. A window might contain a group box which contains a text field and a button. All of these are (direct or indirect) children of the window, but all children also hold a reference to their parent. Qt's signal-slot mechanism would also be difficult to implement in Rust.
Re: Ratatui – App Showcase
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is the renewed interest? We just don’t have good desktop GUI platforms anymore. Qt and GTK are massive beasts, Windows changes theirs every 4 years (and no one wants to be tied to a single platform anyway), we don’t want to deal with Electron, and writing your own GUI from scratch is hard. Terminals just got good lately and it’s way easier to make something higher quality in them than as a GUI. It’s just too h…
Godot is neat for personal tool-making where I just need a small gui with basic controls and can express the whole proggie in just GdScript (API has sufficient OS interactions for most needs), I just whip it out for those when I otherwise don't really use it anymore, just keeping it around for that. Stuff like that: https://postimg.cc/VJc0pWbB
Godot is a heavy dependency for making small tools, no?
Re: Ratatui – App Showcase
#164Shameless plug of my TUI game, also built with Ratatui https://github.com/ricott1/rebels-in-the-sky
Looks really cool! Love the artwork. Right now the video in the readme doesn’t render on github, though. I had to manually download the mp4 from your demo folder to view it.
Re: Ratatui – App Showcase
#165Would be more and more useful to have terminal CLI utilities like running a given prompt or agent over a folder. I'd use that for auditing legal compliance for some projects.
Don't all the major coding agents have CLI mode now? Cline CLI. Opencode CLI. Codex CLI. Gemini CLI. Claude Code CLI. Etc.
Re: Ratatui – App Showcase
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apart from what you said about the GUI situation in Rust (which I disagree with) I think TUI's have their niche. I think writing a useful GUI has considerable overhead no matter which technology you use. In addition they cause other difficulties, like testability, i18n, l10n and accessability. This is why people often resort to command line tools, rightfully so. There are cases, however, where a CLI won't cut it and…
To be fair, TUIs are strictly worse accessibility-wise than GUIs. There's no standard to communicate TUI semantics to assistive technology, and whatever few standards actually exist (like using the cursor to navigate menus instead of some custom highlight) aren't followed. With GUIs, those standards exist, and are at least somewhat implemented by all major (non-Rust)UI frameworks.
Plus there's no reason why most GUI's can't adopt a keyboard-only workflow. It's easy to implement. The inverse is not true.
Re: Ratatui – App Showcase
#167Earlier 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.
Other benefits:
1. Consistent font and sizing. Pick the font you find easiest to read and set it in the terminal, now all TUI apps use it at the correct size.
2. Consistent theming. TUI apps use the same color scheme as your terminal, as your vim, etc. A consistent "desktop" is less distracting. Especially when you don't have to deal with crappy Electron apps displaying animations and ads (looking at you Discord).
3. Efficient on screen real-estate. Most TUI apps don't waste a lot of space on "padding", "giving elements space to breathe" or other "correct UX patterns". They tile nicely.
4. Never and issues copy and pasting. I used a GUI chat app recently that wouldn't let me select text, seriously.
5. Did I mention they are fun to use and relatively easy to develop?
Re: Ratatui – App Showcase
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It would appear that when actually measured head to head, compile times are approximately the same: https://quick-lint-js.com/blog/cpp-vs-rust-build-times/
Re: Ratatui – App Showcase
#169Earlier 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.
I'm glad they contributed something fantastic to the Rust GUI system, but I don't think this is fair: EGUI is fantastic.
I have used egui in actual projects. It is slow, opinionated in a bad way, not very customizable in terms of themes, and definitely not up to date in terms of latest GUI standards. It isn’t even the best RUST GUI project by any of those metrics.
Re: Ratatui – App Showcase
#170Shameless plug of my TUI game, also built with Ratatui https://github.com/ricott1/rebels-in-the-sky
I don't know what I just got into, but I love it. Reminds me of Hattrick (the decades old soccer management sim) but with more elbow grease and panache. If you're even remotely interested, just ssh in and you're off to the races.
BTW, the video at the top of the repo readme won't open on any device I own.