Tui

Way back when, before nice graphical user interfaces, all we had was the terminal. I won’t waste time with a trip down memory lane. Suffice to say there were many cool terminal-based interfaces, and some of us still use terminals (or terminal emulators more likely). And there are still nice terminal-based user interfaces used by many of us, even if that’s just vim or emacs. As I continue my journey learning Rust, I thought I’d take a stab at writing a terminal user-interface (AKA TUI). In this case I will leverage a Rust crate called ratatui. Ratatui provides UI widgets for building a TUI — things like laying out your UI, tabs, tables, scrollbars, and the like. Ratatui focuses on the UI aspects, and leverages other crates for the low level terminal interaction. Several are supported, but the one I chose (and the most common?) is called Crossterm. I am going to focus here more on Ratatui then Crossterm, except as needed. ...