Ink VS ratatui

Compare Ink vs ratatui and see what are their differences.

ratatui

Rust library that's all about cooking up terminal user interfaces (TUIs) 👨‍🍳🐀 (by ratatui-org)
SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
surveyjs.io
featured
InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
featured
Ink ratatui
65 46
25,900 8,098
- 11.3%
6.2 9.7
11 days ago about 24 hours ago
TypeScript Rust
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Ink

Posts with mentions or reviews of Ink. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-05-06.
  • Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
    57 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 May 2024
    I have used this https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink/ to TUI design, it's "React" for TUI. It's pretty good but I had to add a bit of sub-process parallelization since I have a long running process in the background.
  • I created a simple CLI tool that helps you code FAST!
    2 projects | dev.to | 12 Mar 2024
    I've always wanted to build a CLI tool, and when I realized that you can build one using React with Ink, I converted my Python script into a CLI tool.
  • Delete git branches in batches
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Feb 2024
    ⚠️ Git for Windows Terminal is currently not supported, and the tool is limited to ink. We will look for alternatives later. Please use CMD, Vscode terminal's Git... terminal
  • Setup Simple Web UI for Node.js App in Seconds
    2 projects | dev.to | 17 Jan 2024
    There is a good solution for some of those cases - ink. With ink, I can implement text-based UI with knowledge of React, which is neat but there are still some caveats for my usages:
  • Building Reactive CLIs with Ink - React CLI library
    3 projects | dev.to | 3 Nov 2023
    Looks cool, right? Building a similar UI in the terminal without any library would be quite hard, though, thanks to Ink it's almost as easy as building any frontend UI with React.
  • Terminal-like output library for js?
    2 projects | /r/learnjavascript | 26 Jun 2023
    ink?
  • Synchronous File Reading and Writing in Node.js
    1 project | /r/node | 25 Jun 2023
    I'm writing a CLI with ink. Writing async code is important as to not block the rendering and respond to user input. I have a few loading animations that update every 100ms. Synchronous operations can make the animation hang for >500ms, making the animation choppy.
  • Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for Developers Using React
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jun 2023
    You get the comfort of using react components instead of fighting with HTML tables to make your emails look nice. I think it's awesome! It's analog to what ink[0] does with CLI outputs. Sure, you could write fancy CLI outputs in bash, but ink takes the pain out of it and makes it easy.

    [0] https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

  • Is Node.js a good way to implement a CLI app with persistence?
    3 projects | /r/node | 2 Jun 2023
    Due to Node's asynchronous behavior, it makes Node great for long-running processes that make a lot of HTTP requests, database calls, and other async ops, like a web server or a REST API. However, if I am making a CLI tool for pretty much personal use only, with very minimal async operations, then blocking the event loop with a synchronous function that will resolve almost immediately will make no difference perceivable to a human brain or have any speed benefits that someone can actually observe (think `fs.readFileSync` or `require('dotenv') of 10 line config file, or a quick embedded db (sqlite) query with only ~100 records. I'm wondering what the best way to implement the database part of the app synchronous. I can read/write to JSON files but it would be tricky because the data is relational, and some complex joins and other data wrangling operations are required (complex to perform in JS but are easy to implement in a SQL statement). It's not important what the operations are, that's not the point of this post. This is mostly a personal project of interest: making this CLI tool completely avoiding any async operations/using no promises. I would like to use node tho, as I said this is just out of interest and I also want to experiment with several CLI libraries such as Ink or Cliffy.
  • Ink: React for interactive command-line apps
    1 project | /r/patient_hackernews | 8 May 2023

ratatui

Posts with mentions or reviews of ratatui. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-05-06.
  • Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
    57 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 May 2024
    As a sound and music computing person, I rarely used tui before although I use cli tools often, e.g. SoX. I usually use Audacity to record on Mac. But then I realized I wanted a tool that could quickly open and record inspiration, and that's when TUI came into play: I decided to write my own custom tool called asak (audio Swiss Army Knife) [1]

    This way I can quickly record on Mac, and of course, since this is Rust and ratatui [2], this tool should also be cross-platform.

    [1] https://github.com/chaosprint/asak

    [2] https://ratatui.rs/

  • Fast memory vulnerabilities, written in 100% safe Rust
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Feb 2024
    > 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...

  • Show HN: Muse, a CLI background music player
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2024
    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

  • Ratatui: a Rust crate for cooking up Terminal User Interfaces
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023
  • Ratatui
    1 project | /r/patient_hackernews | 10 Dec 2023
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 10 Dec 2023
    1 project | /r/hypeurls | 10 Dec 2023
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Dec 2023
    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.

  • Trippy – A Network Diagnostic Tool
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Dec 2023
    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

  • ratatui 0.24.0 is released! (a Rust library that's all about cooking up terminal user interfaces)
    1 project | /r/u_Dazzling_Finger_8120 | 25 Oct 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ink and ratatui you can also consider the following projects:

Commander.js - node.js command-line interfaces made easy

tui-rs - Build terminal user interfaces and dashboards using Rust

oclif - CLI for generating, building, and releasing oclif CLIs. Built by Salesforce.

crossterm - Cross platform terminal library rust

blessed - A high-level terminal interface library for node.js.

Cursive - A Text User Interface library for the Rust programming language

nestjs-commander - A module for using NestJS to build up CLI applications

textual - The lean application framework for Python. Build sophisticated user interfaces with a simple Python API. Run your apps in the terminal and a web browser.

react-blessed - A react renderer for blessed.

PyLaTeX - A Python library for creating LaTeX files

trippy - A network diagnostic tool