Ratatui TUI Library: An Overview

Demo

Introduction

Ratatui is a Text-based User Interface (TUI) library that provides the necessary components to build feature-rich, interactive command-line applications.

Installation

To install Ratatui, you can use cargo add ratatui crossterm which includes the ratatui library along with crossterm for handling cross-terminal capabilities.

Quickstart

For beginners, a Hello World tutorial is available which demonstrates the initialization of a terminal, handling input events, drawing UI, and restoring the terminal state after the application exits.

Widgets

Built-in

Ratatui comes with a set of built-in widgets, including:

  • BarChart
  • Block
  • Calendar
  • Canvas for drawing points, lines, shapes, and a world map
  • Chart
  • Clear
  • Gauge
  • List
  • Paragraph with Scrollbar
  • Sparkline
  • Table
  • Tabs

Third-party libraries, bootstrapping templates, and widgets

An ecosystem of third-party libraries has grown around Ratatui, providing additional templates and widgets for developers:

  • ansi-to-tui
  • color-to-tui
  • rust-tui-template
  • tui-builder
  • tui-clap
  • tui-log
  • tui-logger
  • tui-realm
  • tui-realm-treeview
  • tui-rs-tree-widgets
  • tui-windows
  • tui-textarea
  • tui-input
  • tui-term

Apps

The library has been widely adopted, as demonstrated by the awesome-ratatui repo which showcases various applications built with Ratatui.

Alternatives

Alternative TUI libraries such as Cursive are also available, offering different features and design philosophies.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments to Pavel Fomchenkov who contributed an awesome logo for Ratatui.

License

Ratatui is available under the MIT license, allowing for broad use and modification.

Documentation and Community

For developers looking to engage with the community or to delve deeper into the library's functionality, there are several resources available:

  • The official Ratatui Website
  • API Documentation
  • Examples showcasing different features and usage scenarios
  • git-cliff for generating changelogs following Conventional Commits standard
  • Guidelines for contributing to the project
  • Discussions about breaking changes and future directions are held on GitHub, Discord server, and Matrix at #ratatui:matrix.org.

Status of this fork

The Ratatui fork, maintained by Florian Dehau, merges changes from the original tui-rs, and the continuous development is reflected in its active community engagement through several online platforms.

By following the Quickstart guide, and with the resources available through the official website and community channels, developers can quickly build and customize efficient TUI applications using the Ratatui library.

Important Note

This overview does not include every individual code example or output image due to the content size limitations. For full detailed code examples and outputs, please refer to the Ratatui documentation and resource links provided.

https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui