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 be such a missed opportunity.
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.
Anecdotal evidence here. My use-case needs some UI, but a full blown GUI is way, way overkill.
I am building tooling around "Verifiable Credentials" (the W3C standard, OpenID standard, and all the standards around and below it).
So me and my co-workers need tools to check JWTs, resolve DIDs, generate Proof of Possession, .well-known contents and services discovery, do OpenId Connect flows, interpret "offer requests", "presentation requests", QR-codes, etc. It started as a bucket of random commandline things that random devs whipped up when needed (in typescript, python, bash, rust, some PHP), and now slowly consolidated into a consistent "toolkit".
I am currently still porting most of these tools to Rust and make their CLI interface and IO consistent.
But from there I'll be adding a TUI very quickly.
By no means meant as "end-user" software - those exist and called "wallets". But for developers and devops working in this niche. These don't need a GUI. I'd even wager these users don't want a GUI but prefer a TUI, but in any case, the TUI is just so much easier and more accessible for me as a dev that it's the choice between a TUI+CLI or no UI, just CLI.
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 believe TUI's are a nice and lean solution that sits right between CLI and full-blown GUI and isn't going anywhere.
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.
> In addition they cause other difficulties, like testability, i18n, l10n and accessability.
Most TUIs don’t have these either. So I don’t see this as a difference between TUI/GUI. If you want to make a GUI and want to ignore these things, you are free to do so.
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 path the available crates becomes far worse than any other language I have ever used.
Of course comparing Rust to something like Python or C++ is unfair to Rust, since Rust has had less time to develop those packages, but I think its more about the community at this point. I just don't see any enthusiasm for working on crates/frameworks. Most of the time when I find a crate I need, its sitting at version 0.3.0, last updated 1-3 years ago, with the documentation simply stating "Reimplementation of X in Rust, go read X's C++ documentation on how to use."
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.
I'm going to agree with you here. I love rust, but this is a big down side. I have to do so much ecosystem building and low level stuff because the libs available don't exist, or are not in a suitably usable state.
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.
You basically preempted nearly every single option, including an incumbent one. I don't believe it's fair to judge Rust based on its compatibility with Qt alone - something written in C++. Nothing against C++, but it's harder to get C++ and Rust to work together. You haven't addressed Iced yet, though going by your requirements, you're unlikely to be satisfied by it as well. Iced is not there yet, but it is the native GUI toolkit of the Cosmic desktop.
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.
// Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce
// Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life
// Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clan’s wisdom be yours:
//
// Never read Hacker News
// - Aphyr, "Hexing the technical interview"
if (document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")) {
document.location = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Human_fart.wav"
}
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!
I think it's pretty normal to have a language dedicated to the UI structure. It should be declarative for easy machine manipulation with a WYSIWYG editor and could be translated to code before compilation.
My reference in this are Delphi .dfm files, which you rarely have to edit manually because they're handled by the IDE form builder. It is still a fantastic IDE to build native UI apps and I don't see a reason why Rust couldn't be used the same way.
I kept forgetting Narrator is a Windows program, and the post read like the author was referring to the "Narrator voice in their head" while testing the UIs.
It made the post more amusing, actually. I sighed when I saw "Windows Narrator" suddenly.
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.
When I went to go look for a platform to implement a personal text editor on, I somewhat quickly settled on the vt100 terminal api with kitty extensions, particularly its keyboard protocol. Everything else locks you into, not only a language, everybody codes frameworks these days, nobody writes apis, but also what's essentially already a legacy solution, a framework is going to get updates at the speed of the developer's passion.
Whereas when kovid made the kitty terminal protocol, it got implemented by the next 3 or so new terminal emulators. You don't get this kind of modernization from any other UI solution save browsers. And no way do I want to do web development for my own stuff. I suppose I could target Dillo or something like Servo, but I'd be more inclined to consume the base X11 protocol, as Vidar H did.
My Ruby terminal protocol implementation has smooth abstractions from methods performing the bare VT control calls up to semantic methods with better naming, to flexible and extensible text field abstractions. All the concerns are separated nicely and Ruby lets me scope everything just right, so I can call a debugger anywhere as the necessary logic is scoped module-wide.
I simply cannot imagine having any kind of fun doing this in a static compiled language. And I'll be able to build on top of this to make things that aren't editors.
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.
I just completely disagree. We have Slint, Dioxus, Tauri, Egui (best imo).
If Dioxus blitz renderer takes off them it will vastly better than 99% of options for other languages
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 you could do things like ad blocking more easily. But maybe you could get them on board if you pitched it as a browser for LLMs. Something something it's a native interface for them. ;)
I know there's some browsers but things like W3M, Lynx, or *links* are... rough... definitely not of the quality we're seeing elsewhere in the current TUI revolution.
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?
Character based interfaces are just nice, IMHO. The Borland IDE was the pinnacle of dev interfaces IMHO. It updated to have modern language server support etc would be my dream dev environment. It would be cool to see how far a compliant web browser could be taken in text mode. It's really sad that most terminals don't have proper image support, btw.
> but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks
Have you used a terminal in the last 5 years? We got graphics and everything now[0]
> huge amount of overhead
A... terminal... with... large overhead? Surely you're joking. Have you met any gui app? Microsoft word takes a few gigs. Have you seen electron apps like Spotify or slack? My fucking mail client takes over half a gig and neomutt takes almost nothing.
Either you're making numbers up or we live in different realities
> actual hardware acceleration?
Hardware acceleration has existed for years...
Maybe stop making assumptions and check out what terminals can do. They've come a long way since the 80's. I'd suggest starting with something like ghostty.
Why would you want to live in a terminal? That's extremely limiting. What you really want is Emacs. Emacs has both a TUI web browser (EWW) and info browser already. You can even run vim in Emacs if you want, either the "real" (and inferior) thing via vterm, or use evil mode or another modal mode for Emacs like god mode.
I wanted to like modal editing in Emacs. But I had to come to terms with the fact that it's always going to be a kludge. Boon is the best I've seen it get, but when I wanted to improve it, I realized it would be less work over the long run to just make my own text editor, though that's mostly because my chosen language, ruby, just doesn't have very good tooling yet.
If you're willing to live in elisp, Emacs is amazing. I'm not, I'm always going to want to do it with ruby, and well, Emacs doesn't let you do that.
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 detect the terminal font. It obviously also renders inline images, which was another reason to use the browser.
And then, Kitty developed the novelty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol (I think it's now also implemented in Ghostty), which means we can skip the text-to-image processing and directly leverage that protocol.
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!
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 hard to make a good small desktop app.
It’s the same reason why it’s easier to make something look great with LEGO than if you want to mold clay. I’d also wager that devs today on average know more about good UX than devs did back in the 80s when clunky terminal apps used to be made.
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
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.
They did this in the 1970s and 1980s too, then they were called “forms libraries” but were often full application frameworks in ways that would be familiar to modern developers of native graphical apps.
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.
> I've seen lots of TUIs lately, why is that? What is the renewed interest?
A few reasons:
- for the most part TUI apps are cross-platform: macOS, Linux, BSD, Windows
- they cut down on context switching. If you're already in the terminal, you shouldn't have to switch to a GUI app to check on something.
- Today's terminal emulators—Ghostty, WezTerm, Kitty, iTerm, Alacrity, etc.—are fast and capable with GPU acceleration, 24-bit color support running on high resolution displays. It makes for a compelling platform to code for.
- Anecdotally lots of developers are spending less time in IDEs and more time in the terminal using Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, etc.
I think that a lot of people here at HN have had bad web interfaces and GUIs inflicted on them for a long time, that a TUI is a welcome change and a big improvement. TUIs are limited, which make it hard to create great interfaces; but those limits also make it hard to create really bad interfaces. Also the TUI is genuinely good at simple-to-moderate complexity software. For an example, try out Midnight Commander.
For me, often, it’s an escape for a GUI world taken over by out-of-control “design” tenets. I value good Ux design concerns, but often working with designers lately feels bureaucratic, at times cargo culting, and overly spacious.
It’s like a graphical form of “I didn’t have time to give you a short answer, so I gave you a long one instead”. TUIs force a paucity that often makes for a nice information/pixels ratio.
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.
Unrelated to the article, a lot of my millennials could see web and then mobile coming, focused on web & mobile, and as a result just weren't really participating in C and C++ development. We used terminal applications leftover from peak GNU.
When Rust came along and presented a career opportunity, terminal apps was a great way to get into it and filled a gap in a lot of people's skill sets. Even when building GUI apps in Rust, your first entry point is a CLI usually.
We took our UX thinking from web & mobile and remixed it with Rust and new ideas came out. Turns out "If it aint broke don't fix it" for two decades can build up a lot of evolutionary pressure.
The main reason for me is simple keyboard navigation. I don't want to click through links and menus, I don't want to use the mouse at all. I think that's also why tiling window managers are popular again.
My theory, web apps are extremely bloated and slow, teams behind it always “optimize” and switch things up, and desktop apps are usually just wrapped web apps. TUI developers don’t mind settling and not always messing up the product and they keep the TUI “lean and mean”. Some users appreciate fast, simple UIs and they don’t want to be constantly A/B tested on only for the core experience to break all the time.
Idk, I see it them all the time on the rust subreddit. Like, cool, but my friend, I have like ten brain cells and all of them are in overdrive. I’m not going to remember I have your TUI app installed AND remember the commands to make it work. If I have to use a CLI I just save the command I need in a text file so I don’t have to look them up. Just give me ang button any where. I’m not picky.
i think this might be caused by codex.
it's open source, many people use it and it uses ratatui. People check how it is implemented and discover ratatui.
I believe this might be current most popular application using this library.
I used codex to write the VHS script, which runs codex to generate a Ratatui app, and then then used codex to add this to the website. It's codapodes all the way down.
That's a big question. I think TUIs are great for glue processes, and it doesn't hurt when they look pretty. They're also excellent first projects with composable interfaces. Shell code is such a pain. It's quick and dirty, but there are a lot of footguns. The main challenge is reducing the friction of making a TUI to the point where it's easy to execute an idea, and a lot of frameworks do this really well. Add the proliferation of LLMs on top, and maybe that could explain it?
I don't care much about forms and windows in the command line (I've had enough of turbo vision back in the 90s), but I don't think I am alone in wanting to see some progress bars and stats for long running processes. So 2% of these libraries is actually pretty useful.
The terminal remains an extremely compelling computing environment in spite of its limitations and fifty years of technical debt. As anachronistic as arcane escape codes and box drawing characters seem in $CURRENT_YEAR, the fact remains that nothing has arisen to fill its niche.
TUIs being designed by engineers for engineers make them rather timeless. Extra points for being keyboard-first: lots of modern GUI tools don’t even consider the keyboard for anything other than text input, to the point that even tab order is broken, if it works at all, or the escape key closes multiple stacked modal windows, or enter doesn’t submit the dialog, or…
They're easier to program and seamlessly integrate into the terminal. That's basically it, other than that they're worse than normal GUIs. Also, GUI frameworks aren't that mature in Rust in particular.
Yeah I think it’s the software equivalent of “go back to the land” type movements. Resurgence of Linux tiling window managers, NeoVim, TUIs. Everything in web and Electron land feels busy, attention grabbing, and bloated. Heck, even VSCode’s defaults are a kind of cluttered.
I for one love the tranquility of a dark mode terminal and find it quite pleasant with a nice nerd font, a pretty color scheme, a single high resolution monitor and an ergonomic keyboard. I feel much more connected to the code or data I’m interacting with in that space. Trying to live there as much as I can lately. JiraTui has been great for preventing context switching at work.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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 be such a missed opportunity.
Every GUI I replace with a TUI is one less flow-breaking obstacle where I have to suddenly reach for the mouse.
I am building tooling around "Verifiable Credentials" (the W3C standard, OpenID standard, and all the standards around and below it).
So me and my co-workers need tools to check JWTs, resolve DIDs, generate Proof of Possession, .well-known contents and services discovery, do OpenId Connect flows, interpret "offer requests", "presentation requests", QR-codes, etc. It started as a bucket of random commandline things that random devs whipped up when needed (in typescript, python, bash, rust, some PHP), and now slowly consolidated into a consistent "toolkit". I am currently still porting most of these tools to Rust and make their CLI interface and IO consistent.
But from there I'll be adding a TUI very quickly.
By no means meant as "end-user" software - those exist and called "wallets". But for developers and devops working in this niche. These don't need a GUI. I'd even wager these users don't want a GUI but prefer a TUI, but in any case, the TUI is just so much easier and more accessible for me as a dev that it's the choice between a TUI+CLI or no UI, just CLI.
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 believe TUI's are a nice and lean solution that sits right between CLI and full-blown GUI and isn't going anywhere.
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.
Most TUIs don’t have these either. So I don’t see this as a difference between TUI/GUI. If you want to make a GUI and want to ignore these things, you are free to do so.
I find egui far easier than Ratatui.
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 path the available crates becomes far worse than any other language I have ever used.
Of course comparing Rust to something like Python or C++ is unfair to Rust, since Rust has had less time to develop those packages, but I think its more about the community at this point. I just don't see any enthusiasm for working on crates/frameworks. Most of the time when I find a crate I need, its sitting at version 0.3.0, last updated 1-3 years ago, with the documentation simply stating "Reimplementation of X in Rust, go read X's C++ documentation on how to use."
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.
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.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/crates/gpui
See the discussion on a collection of elements ontop
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45719004
"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!
It's no less or more equipped than C or C++, so not really sure what to make of this comment given the username lol.
My reference in this are Delphi .dfm files, which you rarely have to edit manually because they're handled by the IDE form builder. It is still a fantastic IDE to build native UI apps and I don't see a reason why Rust couldn't be used the same way.
It made the post more amusing, actually. I sighed when I saw "Windows Narrator" suddenly.
Because it is quite easy to do.
There are also TUIs in other languages, just Rust is more cool.
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...
Whereas when kovid made the kitty terminal protocol, it got implemented by the next 3 or so new terminal emulators. You don't get this kind of modernization from any other UI solution save browsers. And no way do I want to do web development for my own stuff. I suppose I could target Dillo or something like Servo, but I'd be more inclined to consume the base X11 protocol, as Vidar H did.
My Ruby terminal protocol implementation has smooth abstractions from methods performing the bare VT control calls up to semantic methods with better naming, to flexible and extensible text field abstractions. All the concerns are separated nicely and Ruby lets me scope everything just right, so I can call a debugger anywhere as the necessary logic is scoped module-wide.
I simply cannot imagine having any kind of fun doing this in a static compiled language. And I'll be able to build on top of this to make things that aren't editors.
Why Rust? Because I like its power and with recent developments such as subsecond the compile times are absolutely negligible.
Haha!
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Human_fa...
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 you could do things like ad blocking more easily. But maybe you could get them on board if you pitched it as a browser for LLMs. Something something it's a native interface for them. ;)
I know there's some browsers but things like W3M, Lynx, or *links* are... rough... definitely not of the quality we're seeing elsewhere in the current TUI revolution.
Edit: A comment here linked to https://www.brow.sh/ It looks amazing.
Either you're making numbers up or we live in different realities
Hardware acceleration has existed for years...Maybe stop making assumptions and check out what terminals can do. They've come a long way since the 80's. I'd suggest starting with something like ghostty.
[0] https://notcurses.com/
Dead Comment
It's glorious
[0] https://www.brow.sh/
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
https://github.com/rkd77/elinks
I mentioned those by name...
If you're willing to live in elisp, Emacs is amazing. I'm not, I'm always going to want to do it with ruby, and well, Emacs doesn't let you do that.
https://notcurses.com/
https://sr.ht/~ireas/cursive-markup-rs/
the whole cursive library strikes me as very html-like in layout
Deleted Comment
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 detect the terminal font. It obviously also renders inline images, which was another reason to use the browser.
And then, Kitty developed the novelty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol (I think it's now also implemented in Ghostty), which means we can skip the text-to-image processing and directly leverage that protocol.
The good thing is that the image renderer definitely works on ghostty!
The only places I know of is Awesome TUIs [0] and terminaltrove [1]
I can also see that Ratatui has an awesome list too [2].
[0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
[1] https://terminaltrove.com/
[2] https://github.com/ratatui-org/awesome-ratatui
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 hard to make a good small desktop app.
It’s the same reason why it’s easier to make something look great with LEGO than if you want to mold clay. I’d also wager that devs today on average know more about good UX than devs did back in the 80s when clunky terminal apps used to be made.
[0] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples...
A few reasons:
- for the most part TUI apps are cross-platform: macOS, Linux, BSD, Windows
- they cut down on context switching. If you're already in the terminal, you shouldn't have to switch to a GUI app to check on something.
- Today's terminal emulators—Ghostty, WezTerm, Kitty, iTerm, Alacrity, etc.—are fast and capable with GPU acceleration, 24-bit color support running on high resolution displays. It makes for a compelling platform to code for.
- Anecdotally lots of developers are spending less time in IDEs and more time in the terminal using Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, etc.
For me, often, it’s an escape for a GUI world taken over by out-of-control “design” tenets. I value good Ux design concerns, but often working with designers lately feels bureaucratic, at times cargo culting, and overly spacious.
It’s like a graphical form of “I didn’t have time to give you a short answer, so I gave you a long one instead”. TUIs force a paucity that often makes for a nice information/pixels ratio.
When Rust came along and presented a career opportunity, terminal apps was a great way to get into it and filled a gap in a lot of people's skill sets. Even when building GUI apps in Rust, your first entry point is a CLI usually.
We took our UX thinking from web & mobile and remixed it with Rust and new ideas came out. Turns out "If it aint broke don't fix it" for two decades can build up a lot of evolutionary pressure.
I believe this might be current most popular application using this library.
I'm surprised it isn't included in this showcase
I used codex to write the VHS script, which runs codex to generate a Ratatui app, and then then used codex to add this to the website. It's codapodes all the way down.
This means almost all TUI programs can be entirely keyboard driven.
Almost all GUI programs fail at this, in other words, it's extremely likely that at some point, something that requires a mouse action will interrupt.
I for one love the tranquility of a dark mode terminal and find it quite pleasant with a nice nerd font, a pretty color scheme, a single high resolution monitor and an ergonomic keyboard. I feel much more connected to the code or data I’m interacting with in that space. Trying to live there as much as I can lately. JiraTui has been great for preventing context switching at work.
ssh teletekst.nl
[1] https://tweakers.net/geek/237754/nos-maakt-teletekst-beschik...
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.
I see that there are some related discussions on the github: https://github.com/ratatui/ratatui/discussions/1927. Not sure if there is a solution though.
https://github.com/ironcalc/TironCalc
Into the main repo :
https://github.com/ironcalc/ironcalc
Now, I'm not 100% convinced ratatui is the way to go after seeing what the folks of Microsoft did with edit.
Anyhow, I think TironCalc is a great open source project to work with Rust and Ratatui.
https://github.com/ricott1/rebels-in-the-sky
BTW, the video at the top of the repo readme won't open on any device I own.
Absolutely fantastic description right there.