Rich Terminal Interfaces with Ratatui

ratatui is a Rust library to build rich terminal user interfaces and dashboards. It is a fork of the original tui-rs project.
* github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui
* docs: docs.rs/ratatui/latest/ratatui/
* examples: github.com/ratatui-org/ratatu...

[@lowellthoerner1209]

If anyone has any questions about the library, I am one of the contributors and can answer some questions :)

[@brianlogan4740]

I have been attempting to dive into Rust for years now and mostly only accomplish keeping up with "This week in Rust", and cloning GitHub projects and running them. Is there a community preferably also involved with Ratatui that I could join to get some support and learn more?

[@sponkurtus2597]

I have one, i currently making a ascii image shower, so in my terminal app, you can see the ascii image inside a block with borders, the problem is, if the terminal size is too small, the ascii image wont shot 100%, how can i make the ascii images responsive?

[@lowellthoerner1209]

@@sponkurtus2597 you would have to determine the viewport size with the rendering function, then adjust the size of the image appropriately before rendering it out.

[@Iris-jw3ci]

any idea how to use dbg!, print useful values, etc?

[@lowellthoerner1209]

@@Iris-jw3ci well you can’t directly use print macros because they would print to stdout/stderr. However, you could use a Paragraph widget to display arbitrary text upon calling a function, which you could format with the fmt macro.

[@leifelliott1500]

This library makes me want to create an old-school rpg, with the Canvas widget as the game map...

[@pgjybbtqnrqehbkffbntwnhph2924]

Do it buddy and share the link 😊

[@JosephDalrymple]

Do it!

[@brianlogan4740]

Ratatui is dope but you should also check out Bevy for the ECS for games. I believe they have terminal app examples as well.

[@15MinuteWellness]

I was thinking really old school, text-based adventures, with this as a HUD showing the current scene, the characters possesions and status, and a place for descriptions, decisions, and conversations.

[@one.----]

I really appreciate these videos. You're hitting all the things on my list that I want to check out but haven't had the time.

[@birraasmile9722]

Thank you bro, we love you for your Rust topics.

[@MoAliDevOps]

Pretty nice to see my own project on your video (Jirust). Ratatui is pretty nice, fairly easy to use.

[@zozephdev]

Nice, gonna be trying it out for sure

[@micmine]

Nice video. I liked that you have investigated to do an own demo.

[@felixst-gelais6722]

its always a good day when chris drops a video

[@flyingsquirrel3271]

Looks nice! When I recently wanted to add a TUI to a command line tool I wrote, I also tried ratatui, but found cursive much easier to use though.

[@chrisbiscardi]

I'm glad you found a crate that worked for you!

[@jacekkurlit8403]

This looks really dope

[@TeamDman]

Holy cow thanks for the great vid!

[@user-qr4jf4tv2x]

the only UI framework that has example that isn't as hard configuring

[@lagcisco]

good stuff man

[@maxwebstudio]

Awesome !!!!

[@martinbecker1069]

Is Ratatui immediate or can you store the GUI tree for re-use?

[@chrisbiscardi]

yes it is immediate. It expects you to build every widget on every frame. They also note that the overhead of this is usually negligible compared to the overhead of the terminal emulator.

[@lowellthoerner1209]

Stateful widgets are an existing feature but are pretty limited at the moment. Generally, it uses immediate rendering.

[@oredaze]

I must say the name is the best, so if this doesn't become the new ncurses I am going to be sad xD

[@Phant80m]

W rataTUI

[@cchance]

Silly question that drove me nuts why didn’t you just do -100 to fix the db chart so that higher would be… higher lol

[@chrisbiscardi]

I'm going to assume you mean +100 because -100 would make it even lower. I didn't do that because 100 is a totally arbitrary number. Why not 75, or 125? and it results in arbitrarily cutting off the data. The problem was that the dBFS level for an f32 sample is between -758 dBFS and 770 dBFS (you can read more about that here: www.sounddevices.com/32-bit-float-files-explained/ ), I had to fit that into a u64 to graph the sparkline. Doing .abs() loses the least amount of data without needing to pick an arbitrary cutoff. I could've also lerped to get a value from 0-1 but I didn't think about it for more than a second because it wasn't important to the project as long as I could represent any data that came in.

[@cchance]

@@chrisbiscardi I meant subtract the value after absolute from whatever the minimum was for noise floor which i thought you said in video was -100, so 100-abs(-100) would have been 0, just felt like such a minor thing to miss out on fixing :) really great video nonetheless

[@chrisbiscardi]

@@cchance yeah, the way the audio interface I have works, is a self-noise level of -127dBu (which isn't necessarily the same as dBFS), and it contains what I'll refer to as "two sensors". It switches between them to capture the full range its capable of and is an 32-bit float recorder, so it doesn't have "gain" in the same way as a 24-bit recorder. This means it doesn't clip, but also means it can amplify up or down the signal in whatever manner without affecting the actual data. So I could get a different level signal coming into the computer if I was recording something much quieter or louder. That's why I went with something more like .abs(). Its more important for me to be able to not lose data, since this is just a debugging visualizer, than to have a low-to-high graph.

[@babitasaha6655]

which colour scheme are you using on your vscode?

[@chrisbiscardi]

Nightowl

[@babitasaha6655]

@@chrisbiscardi thanks