chat VS rich

TUIs over ssh/telnet can be a lot of fun. Especially in cases where multiple people can interact with each other on the server. It simplifies the programming model as you only have one state on the backend that you render to multiple connections. Syncing up everyone becomes trivial. You can also use some React concepts, like rendering a virtual TUI and sending just the right set of minimal escape sequences back to the user to bring their display up to date.

A few months ago I implemented a telnet chat server[0] for fun and it was surprisingly easy to do so. Even by using a wasm vm that I was still working on at the same time.

[0]: https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/chat

We are investing a lot of effort into making Lunatic feel native to the particular language and ecosystem. If you look at the Rust chat server we built in Lunatic (https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/chat), it fully integrates with cargo. You just run your typical “cargo run” command, it will compile the app to wasm and use lunatic to run it. If you want to run your test, you can just do “cargo test”.

wasm-bindgen is necessary only because it’s really hard right now to merge the wasm world and the JS one in the browser. We have the advantage here of staying out of the browser.

It took me around a week to build it with Rust + Lunatic and you can check out the code here. If you would like to try it out you can connect to it with:

Recently I implemented a command line chat server in Rust using an actor framework. I model each TCP connection as an actor.

Hi HN,

I'm working on an Erlang inspired WebAssembly runtime for the backend[0]. Recently I added TCP support and was looking for apps I could build with it. I ended up building a telnet line chat app. It was a great dogfooding experience and has a nice retro feel to it.

You can access the US server with:

> telnet lunatic.chat

or the EU one with:

> telnet eu.lunatic.chat

Pick the one closer to you, as all the rendering is done on the backend and lower latency will mean better UX.

The server is open source[1] and written in Rust. The Rust code is then compiled to WebAssembly and runs on top of Lunatic. Each connection runs in a separate (lightweight) process, has it's own state and sends just a diff of esc-sequences back to the terminal to bring it up to date with the current render buffer. Everything is deployed to an ARM Linux box.

[0]: https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/lunatic

[1]: https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/chat

The server is open source and written in Rust. The Rust code is then compiled to WebAssembly and runs on top of Lunatic. Each connection runs in a separate (lightweight) process, has it's own state and sends just a diff of esc-sequences back to the terminal to bring it up to date with the current render buffer. Everything is deployed to an ARM Linux box.

There is an open issue [1] on GitHub to make it more modular and get rid of markdown and syntax highlighting but I have no hope for rich to get more minimal.

[1]: https://github.com/Textualize/rich/issues/2277

I hope he doesn't mind, but the creator of Rich and Textualize is a good guy, and Scottish: https://www.willmcgugan.com/about/

https://www.textualize.io/

https://github.com/Textualize/rich

They keep getting improved error messaging and this is one of my favorite features. But I'd love if we could get some real rich text. Idk if anyone else uses rich, but it has infected all my programs now. Not just to print with colors, but because it makes debugging so much easier. Not just print(f"{var=}") but the handler[0,1]. Color is so important to these types of things and so is formatting. Plus, the progress bars are nice and have almost completely replaced tqdm for me[2]. They're just easier and prettier.

[0] https://rich.readthedocs.io/en/stable/logging.html

[1] Try this example: https://github.com/Textualize/rich/blob/master/examples/exce...

[2] Side note: does anyone know how to get these properly working when using DDP with pytorch? I get flickering when using this and I think it is actually down to a pytorch issue and how they're handling their loggers and flushing the screen. I know pytorch doesn't want to depend on rich, but hey, pip uses rich so why shouldn't everyone?

colors.crumb extends Crumb with basic terminal styling functions and RGB, HEX, ANSI conversion functions. It is in the realm of JavaScript's chalk and Python's rich but slightly more functional 😉.

I am working on a new python project and one of the first things I added was https://github.com/Textualize/rich because of how easy it is to make things look good in the terminal.

I am not rewriting anything but I'd love to have a library like `rich` in Rust: https://github.com/textualize/rich

Add some cool-looking stuff to your output with rich.

You might consider taking inspiration from the rich module. In particular, I like how rich supports inline color theming which seems much more cumbersome in your framework, requiring the use of context managers as well as familiarity with how your framework structures color objects. Other than that though, I'm impressed!

Today I released coBib 4.0, my console bibliography manager written in Python, which now uses rich and textual to provide a cohesive and modern user experience in both its CLI and TUI.