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Ratatui – App Showcase

ratatui.rs

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Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#201

Post by seanw444 »

aj_hackman wrote: post #198
adastra22 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We gave up X11 for the unfulfilled promise of something greater. A tech tale as old as time.

Is Wayland really that bad though? I switched from Awesome to Hyprland, and the gaming support (VRR, HDR), among other things is much more straightforward. For normal desktop usage, I haven't seen much of a difference. Certainly not a negative one.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#202

Post by k_bx »

dlivingston wrote: post #162
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…

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.

Why not just use Arc and clone the cyclical references as much as you want `button: RefCell>>`?

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#203

Post by littlestymaar »

ororoo wrote: post #195
littlestymaar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal. You can already do this, since the 90s: Lynx[1] and w3m[2] have both existed for more than three decades at this point. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m

I believe they wants text browser written specifically in rust, and does not want to touch any software written in filth like c/c++.

Too bad Rust compiles with LLVM (C++) and the stdlib links to glibc (C) then.

I sincerely hope it isn't the reason though, I'm a huge rust fan myself (10years of coding with it already) and I think rust is definitely the future, but that doesn't mean all previous open source foundations should be thrown away.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#204

Post by orbital-decay »

prmoustache wrote: post #187
eviks wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they do not, GUI is more capable of handling keyboards than TUI because terminals still have pretty dumb limitations where some modifiers aren't even visible/bindable!

Maybe in theory, but in practice they literally all fail at that.

Every text editor and most professional apps have elaborate hotkey schemes in practice, though. It's a matter of target audience and developer intent. There's nothing special about TUIs in regards to keyboard driveability, and they're heavily limited in just about every single way I can think of. Which is the main reason most TUI apps are simple and small utilities.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#205

Post by the_gipsy »

unmotivated-hmn wrote: post #200
the_gipsy wrote: post #111

Shameless plug: https://github.com/benjajaja/mdfried/ Markdown is really cool in the sense that you can still look at the raw text and read it easily. But one thing that always made me load up .md files in the browser was that it's just much easier to read when the headers are bigger. So I wrote a markdown viewer that renders the headers as images. You need to configure your font once for it to work, can't really det…

This is very cool, thanks for sharing! p.s. I don't think Ghostty implements this protocol (yet?)

You're right, I think I misheard that on some YouTube video. There's a discussion on the ghostty repo, and someone said presenterm had something though.

The good thing is that the image renderer definitely works on ghostty!

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#206

Post by OkayPhysicist »

eviks wrote: post #172
hombre_fatal wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they do not, GUI is more capable of handling keyboards than TUI because terminals still have pretty dumb limitations where some modifiers aren't even visible/bindable!

IMO, the value in TUIs lie in 1) Composability: we've got really good tools for manipulating terminal windows like tmux, :term in vim, etc, whereas the same can't really be said for OS-level windows and 2) As a shibboleth: They implicitly state that they're built by and for keyboard-centric technical users, and thus the wants and needs of keyboard-centric technical users are going to be the valued over the wants and needs of the lowest common denominator. 3) They look cool.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#207

Post by bmitc »

weinzierl wrote: post #96
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…

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…

> I think writing a useful GUI has considerable overhead no matter which technology you use.

I find egui far easier than Ratatui.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#208

Post by bmitc »

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…

Do you happen to have any particular examples?

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#209

Post by kibwen »

eviks wrote: post #175
kibwen wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say is true, but TUIs are not strictly worse than GUIs at accessibility. The fact that text is inherently more legible than graphics means that, for example, blind players can play console-based roguelikes (and do: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/playing-roguelikes-when-you... ), and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup even has configuration options to improve the experience for blind people: https://github.com/crawl/…

Text isn't more legible without structure, and without communicating structure, which is what various accessibility toolkits do, you don't get this supposed benefit

Text has inherent structure that GUIs don't. The ceiling for GUIs is higher (thanks to standards and supporting frameworks), but the floor for TUIs is higher.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#210

Post by adastra22 »

seanw444 wrote: post #201
aj_hackman wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We gave up X11 for the unfulfilled promise of something greater. A tech tale as old as time.

Is Wayland really that bad though? I switched from Awesome to Hyprland, and the gaming support (VRR, HDR), among other things is much more straightforward. For normal desktop usage, I haven't seen much of a difference. Certainly not a negative one.

Wayland completely punted on the remote display capabilities of X11. There has been no effort to replicate this functionality. If you switch to Wayland, you can no longer run GUI apps through SSH.
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