Cursive VS Azul

Rust has great libraries for TUIs. tui-rs (https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs) has been used in numerous popular applications, but is unmaintained. ratatui (https://github.com/tui-rs-revival/ratatui) is the maintained version, and is pretty new. Less widely known is cursive (https://github.com/gyscos/cursive), which I have yet to try.

Aside from the libraries, I just wanted to start a project that would make be better at Rust. The easy distribution with cargo is a huge bonus though.

There are plenty of terminal UI libraries that are actually nice to work with. For Python, there's Textual and PyTermGUI. For Rust, there's ratatui and Cursive (or, if you want something a bit lower level, crosster or termion). For Go, there's bubbletea.

Switching the backend of Cursive to crossterm removed dependence on ncurses

I'd hear of TUIs so I just searched for tui libraries in Rust and Cursive seemed like a good choice and it turned out great!

This weekend I started porting my game to a different UI library (egui) as a way of familiarizing myself with egui. I don't think I'll have something useable to build off of before this year's 7DRL challenge so I guess I'll be reusing my existing UI code (using cursive). But, once I finish porting the UI it should be a lot easier to add fancy stuff like animations, tooltips, and graphical tiles since I won't be tied to constraints of a terminal UI.

Cursive should let you easily build a layout with a menu and status bars (and mouse works).

The thing that gets me about Dwarf Fortress is that it's a 64-bit text-mode game.

As a grey-haired developer who got excited about "DOS Extenders" that allowed 32-bit mode, seeing a text-mode game written as a native 64-bit application is bizarrely anachronistic.

I get a similar feeling from text-mode GUI frameworks for Rust, which allow multi-threading and 64-bit but are essentially clones of Borland Turbo Vision, where you had to be mindful to keep lists smaller than 64KB: https://github.com/gyscos/cursive

Maybe this helps?

cursive

Not sure what you mean but WebRender powers Firefox which definitely works on the desktop.

You can use it to build desktop UI frameworks - see for example https://azul.rs/

I'd been wanting to see this, preferably with JS being optional, and just allowing direct DOM access.

I initially thought this was what Azul was, but it's only just using Servo's WebRender compositor, and rolls its own CSS parser, DOM, and layout engine, so it doesn't benefit from most of the work done on Servo, and supports less CSS features.

https://github.com/fschutt/azul

Both Servo and Fifefox make use of webrender, which is an awesome piece of tech and is well suited to render a web page. Some GUI projects attempted to use webrender directly as well, like Azul and moxie-native

> But no one is saying, "Hey I have a CSS 2.1 compliant rasterizer and compositor that you can use in your C++ or Rust environment!" are they?

There’s actually quite a lot of interesting work going on in that general space, has been in various forms for some years. A couple that immediately spring to mind:

• Azul <https://azul.rs/> builds on WebRender, as used in Firefox. I haven’t looked at it for a few years, but it looks to have grown quite interesting now.

• Blitz <https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz> is based on from-scratch implementations of CSS layout and rendering, and wgpu rendering. It’s not usable yet, but is a very interesting concept. If one happens to be familiar with React Native: it’s kinda like that, or React Native Web.

Azul[1] was my solution for that, it was based on WebRender. I didn't get around to finish it in 2019, but I will work on it this year, maybe I'll get it to be mature enough to post it here.

> wide portability (at least Windoze, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, embedded: Azul is Windows-Linux-Mac only, don't underestimate the effort to properly port something to a new platform

> "though a Vulkan-based renderer can be made to run pretty much anywhere": WebRender is OpenGL + using software rendering as a fallback

> a permissive open source license: MPL-2.0

> a C interface/wrap to allow a wide programming language binding support: yes

> and an easily extensible and themable set of basic widgets: also yes

[1] https://azul.rs/

There is Iced which is used by system76 in Pop!_OS, Druid [DISCONTINUED], GTK-rs, Relm, Azul and Tauri. Personally I would use Tauri for its speed using the OS's native web render, documentation of use with things such as Sveltekit and the ability to make UI's using JS, CSS and HTML. Tauri similarly to Electron whilst being far faster. But its up to personal preference really. There aren't any solid "go to" options at the moment.

Sounds like you may be interested in azul not exactly servo based but on projects that originate from servo. Also this is not a typical WebView, for example it does not use HTML but uses DOM to define it's UI, and there is no JS engine in there.

Azul uses webrender. But your "glue" program is like half the web browser. You also need a vector graphics library to render websites. Webrender only does boxes, but not complex SVG paths. Once the plan was to use pathfinder, but mozilla fired the dev and they still using an old version of chromium's skia for that.

One day I'll get around to finish my library Azul [1]. Hopefully.

[1] https://azul.rs/

azul