Termion VS Native Windows GUI

Ratatui is a Rust library for TUIs that uses immediate-mode rendering: each frame you describe the entire UI (widgets and layout), and Ratatui draws it. What is Ratatui? It’s a lightweight, unopinionated toolkit—it doesn’t impose an Elm-style model or a specific app structure. You keep your own state, run your own event loop (typically with crossterm, termion, or termwiz), and call terminal.draw(|f| { ... }) to render. So the difference between Elm-style and immediate mode is exactly this: in Elm-style the framework owns the loop and you react via Update/View; in immediate mode you own the loop and redraw the whole UI from current state every frame.

This is an example from the Termion crate:

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.

But let's say I want to write to Termion's raw terminal: stdout().into_raw_mode().unwrap();

And I implemented it for a TermWriter struct (Note: DetectCursorPos comes from the Termion crate):

The following code stores the user input and cursor position in a raw terminal (using Termion):

That being said, termion has already handle this for us (an example).

I'm trying to recreate the Backspace functionality with Termion in raw mode. Right now, it works as expected if I'm deleting the last character. But If I move to the left with the Left arrow, then delete a character, the characters on the right of the cursor won't move to the left.

Termion crate (https://crates.io/crates/termion), and very careful observation of a rust error. Hope your friend finds it useful ;)

Found an alternative https://github.com/redox-os/termion

[2] https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui

On windows, I'll probably use https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui or https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs both of them seem pretty solid.

https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui isn't in the list but is quite a polished option for building Windows specific GUIs.

My crate native-windows-gui supports tray application, if you only care about Windows. Example: https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui/blob/master/native-windows-gui/examples/system_tray_d.rs

Created a small resident windows program that shows a different icon depending on battery level test how easy using windows-rs and native-windows-gui is. Picked this as an easy learning project after seeing Battery Buddy for macOS.

native-windows-ui => https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui