tui-rs VS Cursive

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

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.

CLI, use Clap. If you want to get fancy, use Tui.

u/lordnacho666 It uses the fabulous https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs (now revived as https://github.com/tui-rs-revival/ratatui) TUI lib.

This app is based on the these two crate in rust (tui-rs , tui-textarea). The text area provide the Emacs motions and I integrated the vim motions there, but the editor in this app as much simpler than the huge VIM and Emacs systems

If you interested in the TUI apps in rust you can start with the crate tui-rs or its revival ratatui. They have examples inside of them which you can start and see the source code to get the basic functionalities. For the text editor you can check examples in the crate tui-textarea.

For Golang there is Bubbletea [1], Textual [2] for Python and tui-rs for Rust [3].

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

[2] https://github.com/textualize/textual

[3] https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs

You can check tui-rs, is a library to build CLI interfaces and has some examples about using user input without blocking the UI

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