ratatui VS toolong

We use a cassowary based constraint solver within Ratatui [1]. It's kind of neat once you understand the algorithm and add your own UI rules system on top of it. Unfortunately the library[2] that we use for the actual solving is unmaintained for many years now. I've been meaning to rewrite[3] a bunch of things in the lib to be more ergonomic, but it hasn't bubbled to the top of my todo list yet.

[1]: https://github.com/ratatui/ratatui/blob/main/ratatui-core/sr...

[2]: https://crates.io/crates/cassowary/

[3]: https://crates.io/crates/kasuari

I think this may lack a bit of context, so I'll try to fill in.

This is a demo that was just showcased live by the author as part of their talk at FOSDEM'25: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5496-brin...

The talk was centered on Ratatui (a TUI library in Rust, https://ratatui.rs/) now targeting terminals and web browsers with a shared approach. Video recording of the talk should appear online soon.

Proudly built with Ratatui: https://github.com/ratatui/ratatui :)

The graphics themselves are basically handmade pixel-by-pixel, you can take a look in the assets folders to get an idea.

For example, pirate images are generated by combining the different parts and then applying a color mapping for the different skin tones.

Planet gifs are adapted starting from https://deep-fold.itch.io/pixel-planet-generator

Excellent article of what is going on in the terminal space, agree on the TUI section where we are seeing lots of terminal tools being built in Rust and Go and libraries such as Ratatui [1] and Bubble Tea [2] becoming a new modern alternative to ncurses for building TUIs.

Python has Textualize which is also very popular for building terminal user interfaces [3]

And we've noticed this renaissance as well of new CLI and TUI tools that we list on Terminal Trove [4].

[1] https://ratatui.rs/

[2] https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

[3] https://textual.textualize.io/

[4] https://terminaltrove.com/

I recently had to look at the implementation of the Sparkline [1] widget in Ratatui which uses a similar Unicode technique but scales nicely for sparklines with larger vertical size.

[1] https://github.com/ratatui/ratatui/blob/20c88aaa5b9eb011a522...

This is why Textualize[1] concerns me. I've tried a few of the applications using their framework, and they have noticable keypress latency. I didn't think it was possible to make a bloated TUI, but they have somehow succeeded. This might just be a Python thing because of the GIL, because VisiData[2] has the same problem.

It's reminiscent of scroll-jacking, excessive animation, and other web GUI bloat, just translated to TUIs.

[1]: https://www.textualize.io/

[2]: https://www.visidata.org/

The code base seems like a good reference as a small Python project.

My fav option in this class of apps: https://lnav.org/ It lets you use journalctl with pipes as requested here: https://github.com/Textualize/toolong/issues/4