Cursive VS gtk

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

thread 'main' panicked at 'libgtk-3 was configured with `--enable-debug=no`. See https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk/issues/270 for details', /home/(username)/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823/gtk-0.5.0/src/rt.rs:137:13

basically I setup gtk how it is described on the gtk-rs.org site and official gtk guide https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/windows/ using msys2, for more details check this video it describes exactly what I did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUJFYOCbuDg

You could make bar pretty easily with GTK. You should read up on the Wayland and GTK documentation. GTK has official bindings for C and Python, and there is gtk-rs.org for Rust.

There's https://crates.io/crates/gtk

I wouldn't expect there to be a tutorial specifically for writing a file manager. (After all, the vast majority of people who write GUI apps for Linux never write a file manager.) But there is some documentation on how to write GUIs with Rust and GTK here https://gtk-rs.org/.