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 itself supports four different backends to draw to the terminal. You can either choose from:
However, some features may only be available in one of the four.
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.
The demo shown in the gif can be run with all available backends
(exmples/*_demo.rs files). For example to see the termion version one could
run:
cargo run --example termion_demo --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.
Beware that the termion_demo only works on Unix platforms. If you are a Windows user,
you can see the same demo using the crossterm backend with the following command:
cargo run --example crossterm_demo --no-default-features --features="crossterm" --release -- --tick-rate 200
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 demo cargo run --example demo), and quit by pressing q.
You can run all examples by running make run-examples.
You might want to checkout Cursive for an alternative solution to build text user interfaces in Rust.