Cursive VS rust-sciter

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

Most GUI apps don't need what Qt provides though. They mostly need stability and cross-platform support, so ... they should start with something like Tauri or Sciter, and if there is something they need natively they will be in a much better situation to pick their poison.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri uses OS provided WebView

https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter uses Sciter

I seriously advise against using rust-sciter. It uses a lot of unsafe code, some of which is invalid and directly causes Undefined Behavior; see for example issue #114. rust-sciter's author doesn't seem to have any interest in fixing those. Besides, the code is highly unidomatic and looks like it's been written to resemble C++ – this is in itself not wrong, but always a red flag.

I use https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter in my project https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk