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Ratatui – App Showcase

ratatui.rs

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Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#71

Post by ogoffart »

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…

Author of one of these "markup"-based toolkits here. I believe that Rust might not be the best language syntax to express UI. I am curious why you are so strongly against using a DSL.

This topic comes up often, so I wrote a blog post explaining why I think a DSL is a good fit: https://slint.dev/blog/domain-specific-language-vs-imperativ...

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#72

Post by gf000 »

godelski wrote: post #34

I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal. Is anyone working on this? With the speed terminals are and support for graphics through things like sixel and shaders I'd love to have a browser even if I couldn't do videos. Even if it was like viewing most pages in reader mode. I'm not sure some big companies would be happy about that though since it likely would mean yo…

But.. why? Like I do get the occasional need where it's easier to just see an html page in the terminal, but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks with a huge amount of overhead, over having a real buffer and just writing pixels to it, with actual hardware acceleration?

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#73

Post by crazyloglad »

flomo wrote: post #45
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…

The low-level terminal stuff is still grody as hell. Years ago, HN had some blogposts from someone who was rethinking the whole stack, but I dunno what happened to that project. If people really like TUIs, eventually they're going to stop doing the 1980s throback stuff.

It's still around. Still doing its thing. One developer drafted a backend to ratatui for it, but he's been silent lately. I'm only marginally interested in that angle as its endgame "just" lands in TurboVision but Rust! and having to stay compatible with the feature-set of terminal emulation defeats the point.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#74

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#75

Post by palata »

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.

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#76

Post by nhatcher »

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'?

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#79

Post by huflungdung »

gf000 wrote: post #72
godelski wrote: post #34

I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal. Is anyone working on this? With the speed terminals are and support for graphics through things like sixel and shaders I'd love to have a browser even if I couldn't do videos. Even if it was like viewing most pages in reader mode. I'm not sure some big companies would be happy about that though since it likely would mean yo…

But.. why? Like I do get the occasional need where it's easier to just see an html page in the terminal, but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks with a huge amount of overhead, over having a real buffer and just writing pixels to it, with actual hardware acceleration?

[dead]

Re: Ratatui – App Showcase

#80

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #34

I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal. Is anyone working on this? With the speed terminals are and support for graphics through things like sixel and shaders I'd love to have a browser even if I couldn't do videos. Even if it was like viewing most pages in reader mode. I'm not sure some big companies would be happy about that though since it likely would mean yo…

[deleted]
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