Inquirer.js VS ratatui

Inquirer.js is a handy tool for adding interactive prompts to your CLI.

There is a CLI application based on Inquirer. Potentially, it could be another CLI library, say something from the following list. Our goal is to provide integration tests. But before that, let's look at the related terminology.

inquirer

If you boil plop down to its core, it is basically glue code between inquirer prompts and handlebar templates.

This is a new tutorial on how to create a command line interface application, and our application today is a Mortgage Calculator. I used in this program packages such as 1- inquirer for interactive questions and answers: https://www.npmjs.com/package/inquirer 2- Sqlite3 DBMS 3- Chalk for colorful output in the terminal: https://www.npmjs.com/package/chalk

We can easily achieve that with the inquirer package. This package allows you to ask different types of questions, such as input questions (open-text questions), confirmation questions (Yes/No), etc.

> If someone plopped me in front of a rust codebase I'd be at the mercy of the manual for quite a long time.

This is not a representative sample of Rust. That's explicitly triggering edge cases which requires abuse of syntax you wouldn't normally see.

Check out this for something more realistic that anyone should understand https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui/blob/main/examples/ca...

nice work!

can I use "cargo install --git https://github.com/aabiji/muse"?

I also recommend:

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

https://github.com/mikaelmello/inquire

for your further development

I also have a Rust CLI music project here if you want to have a look

https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli

There are apps that are built on ratatui that support mouse already including an example in the repo[1], and crates (and some internal changes to the buffer) to support iterm/kitty/sixel based images.[2]

[1]: https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui/tree/main/examples#cu...

[2]: https://crates.io/crates/ratatui-image

Compared to TurboVision, Ratatui has a lot of missing things:

- Containers

- Dialog types (I'm working on this in https://github.com/joshka/tui-prompts)

- Higher order combinations of widgets (e.g. combine the scrollbar and paragraph)

- Menus

- Any event system (apps bring their own - we just handle display)

- etc.

- There's lots of things in TV that are provided as external crates (like editors, treeview, etc.)

The main thing is that Ratatui is at least right now, just the display side of things. Things to do with events or application shell aren't built-in. This somewhat stems from the immediate vs retained mode approach to the library, but this may change in the future.

The TUI is built with the awesome Ratatui [0] library (formerly tui-rs [1]). UX is certainly not my area of expertise and I would not have been able to create Trippy without this library.

[0] https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui

[1] https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs