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the title of this post is odd? it’s a showcase of TUI applications built with this Rust crate — which I am hearing about for the first time, and am interested in. I was expecting a blog post on why Rust is experiencing a TUI revolution or something
Some of the most interesting projects here have the worst installation stories.It's sort of tilting at windmills to not acknowledge that people are going to mostly install through package managers for their platform by advertising it as such. I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with building from source. On the contrary, I think it's fantastic as many targets are supported here as there are! I think it's a shame more people aren't discovering them is all.
Very dope. I really like dua as my mac only has 256 GB.
What is the best / most popular / user friendly terminal http client I can replace postman with. Has a history I can search, save favorites, secure etc.
Ratatui is neat but the way it's architected, you need to take on third party dependencies for each individual widget. And we're talking basic things like spinners, checkboxes, text areas, etc. -- there aren't too many widgets built into ratatui itself. I didn't like the idea of taking all that on so instead I went with something more handrolled.
I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal.

Is anyone working on this?

With the speed terminals are and support for graphics through things like sixel and shaders I'd love to have a browser even if I couldn't do videos. Even if it was like viewing most pages in reader mode.

I'm not sure some big companies would be happy about that though since it likely would mean you could do things like ad blocking more easily. But maybe you could get them on board if you pitched it as a browser for LLMs. Something something it's a native interface for them. ;)

I know there's some browsers but things like W3M, Lynx, or *links* are... rough... definitely not of the quality we're seeing elsewhere in the current TUI revolution.

People keep asking why TUIs in Rust and the answer is because the GUI situation in Rust is dreadful: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...

Rust is simply not meant for GUI-based data design but I still want Qt in Rust. That's it. Not QML or Slint. No markup at all. None of the immediate mode things. No other languages. Definitely not GTK. I'm worried it will never happen for Rust and it will be such a missed opportunity.

Cosmic DE is written in Rust, it's nice and is a good proof you can do GUI in Rust quite well
Oh good collection. This is good. Found lots of good tools here.
(shameless plug) I don't know if anyone would be interested in taking this but I have what I think is a really nice project. Integrating this;

https://github.com/ironcalc/TironCalc

Into the main repo :

https://github.com/ironcalc/ironcalc

Now, I'm not 100% convinced ratatui is the way to go after seeing what the folks of Microsoft did with edit.

Anyhow, I think TironCalc is a great open source project to work with Rust and Ratatui.

Nice. It would be also cool if they add 'cargo install %tool%' commands for each one.
This is basically how dioxus 0.7.0 works. You can download components, and they will automatically add the source to your source and then you can just freely use them

https://dioxuslabs.com/components/

Wow, I did not know that some of my most loved apps in terminal are written in Rust: yazi, atuin, bottom, isn't fzf also written in Rust? And today I learned about some more I want to explore: csvlens, bandwhich, dua, material, oha.

I find these apps so increadibly useful, I almost want to learn Rust :D

Would be more and more useful to have terminal CLI utilities like running a given prompt or agent over a folder. I'd use that for auditing legal compliance for some projects.
So many MS-DOS application memories comming back, really don't get it in the age of cheap graphics.

Need to dust off my Turbo Vision and Clipper projects.

I tried Ratatui for a small app. I just needed a textbox, and I copied an example from the tutorial. When typing (quickly), the CPU usage was crazy. I was expecting something like 0% CPU (it's just typing text, a similar app in Go uses nothing) but it was using like 8% CPU.

I would guess I was doing something wrong, but it was really running an example from the official website. So I gave up on Ratatui.

I want a small wrapper around slumber so it can take the same command line arguments and options as curl. I now there are several attempts at making a graphical UI for curl, but slumber has a very nice and simple cli.
How is the Windows support in Ratatui? I recently developed something with a different library (also crossterm based) only to discover it did not work very well for my windows users and ended up having to build a GUI with Iced.

There’s a very real chance I just missed some initialization code that Ratatui might do out of the box that the other library was not.

Edit: Issues experienced by windows users were no colors, terminal flashing on every keypress, all keypresses registered as double.

Edit2: This miniature rant inspired me to go back to the commit and submit a patch to eliminate the event reporting on KeyUp and enable terminal colors.

Shameless plug:

https://github.com/benjajaja/mdfried/

Markdown is really cool in the sense that you can still look at the raw text and read it easily. But one thing that always made me load up .md files in the browser was that it's just much easier to read when the headers are bigger.

So I wrote a markdown viewer that renders the headers as images. You need to configure your font once for it to work, can't really detect the terminal font. It obviously also renders inline images, which was another reason to use the browser.

And then, Kitty developed the novelty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol (I think it's now also implemented in Ghostty), which means we can skip the text-to-image processing and directly leverage that protocol.

I began learning Rust in my spare time - as a C++ dev it seemed like the right thing to do. I ended up using Ratatui for a hangman implementation. I really liked using it, I ended up with an itch to make an oldschool roguelike with it. Perhaps some day I'll carry on and do it.
There are some truly gorgeous TUIs in that list