QMetaObject crate for Rust VS Cursive

You can use Rust with QML[1].

QML is actually pretty amazing. I've been building my block editor[2] view entirely in QML while the model is in C++. This separation of logic and presentation works great. And yes, there are some crashes sometimes (that I find quite easy to debug thanks to the built-in debugger), but take for example a similar app that's built with Rust and Dart[3], in my testing there were still memory leaks that caused my computer to hang. It's better to know you have a bug than for it to be hidden from you.

I agree with parent commenter, saying these cross-platform frameworks will end up supporting the least common denominator set of features. But I found with external open source libraries, the community is catching up very fast. For example, you want the awesome translucency macOS apps have for your Qt app? Here you go[4]. Many such cases. It's also pretty straightforward to add your own custom OS-dependent code, especially so, if someone already open sourced his approach. I recently wanted to move the traffic light buttons on macOS for my app, but couldn't figure the Objective-C code for that. I ended up looking at either Tauri or Electron source code and found my answer.

[1] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs

[2] https://www.get-plume.com/

[3] https://www.appflowy.io/

[4] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit

I just used qmetaobject-rs and my experience with Qt/QML. There's the QML book from Qt if you're just starting, which is pretty nice https://www.qt.io/product/qt6/qml-book

qmetaobject is probably the most mature Qt Rust binding at the moment. It uses the cpp crate to embed C++ inline in Rust to create its bindings. There are some people using it and it does get some maintenance, but it's not under active development since the original author is now working on Slint.

The bindings currently use the git version of qttypes since I had to merge some upstream changes that are needed for these bindings. So they are not ready for prime time just yet.

There are a bunch of bindings with different language, but even the ones that are officially supported like PySide will still be second class citizen and awkward to use.

Automated binding generation will never give you idiomatic API in whatever language. And if you want an idiomatic library that wraps Qt, it's going to take a huge amount of work.

Which is why I think restricting to QML makes sense because that's a much smaller API surface. That was the ambition behind my previous crate that exposes QML to rust: https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs/

But now I've moved on to another GUI project: Slint https://github.com/slint-ui/slint

Whisperfish does this with Qt: https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs/issues/102

What do you want to know? It's pretty easy thanks to the amazing work of guys behind qmetaobject-rs.

This is probably the portion that I found the most difficult. The README of qmetaobject-rs gives us a basic idea of the build script, so I started with that. Here is my starting script

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