Build terminal user interfaces and dashboards using Rust
⚠️ August 2023: This crate is no longer maintained. See https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui for an actively maintained fork. ⚠️
tui-rs
is a Rust library to build rich terminal
user interfaces and dashboards. It is heavily inspired by the Javascript
library blessed-contrib and the
Go
library termui.
The library supports multiple backends:
The library is based on the principle of immediate rendering with intermediate
buffers. This means that at each new frame you should build all widgets that are
supposed to be part of the UI. While providing a great flexibility for rich and
interactive UI, this may introduce overhead for highly dynamic content. So, the
implementation try to minimize the number of ansi escapes sequences generated to
draw the updated UI. In practice, given the speed of Rust
the overhead rather
comes from the terminal emulator than the library itself.
Moreover, the library does not provide any input handling nor any event system and you may rely on the previously cited libraries to achieve such features.
I'm actively looking for help maintaining this crate. See this issue
Since version 0.17.0, tui
requires rustc version 1.56.1 or greater.
The demo shown in the gif can be run with all available backends.
# crossterm
cargo run --example demo --release -- --tick-rate 200
# termion
cargo run --example demo --no-default-features --features=termion --release -- --tick-rate 200
where tick-rate
is the UI refresh rate in ms.
The UI code is in examples/demo/ui.rs while the application state is in examples/demo/app.rs.
If the user interface contains glyphs that are not displayed correctly by your terminal, you may want to run the demo without those symbols:
cargo run --example demo --release -- --tick-rate 200 --enhanced-graphics false
The library comes with the following list of widgets:
Click on each item to see the source of the example. Run the examples with with
cargo (e.g. to run the gauge example cargo run --example gauge
), and quit by pressing q
.
You can run all examples by running cargo make run-examples
(require
cargo-make
that can be installed with cargo install cargo-make
).
You might want to checkout Cursive for an alternative solution to build text user interfaces in Rust.