Ratatui – App Showcase(ratatui.rs)
315 pointsby AbuAssar7 hours ago20 comments
  • RustSupremacist4 hours ago
    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.

    • elmt3529 minutes ago
      Zed (https://zed.dev) is a GUI built in rust. Im not an expert in GUI building so maybe I'm wrong and they used a separate language for the GUI.
    • sunbum30 minutes ago
      Why does that link redirect to a fart sound hosted on Wikipedia?
    • lenkite37 minutes ago
      Doesn't https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component tick all your boxes ?
    • ogoffart2 hours ago
      Author of one of these "markup"-based toolkits here. I believe that Rust might not be the best language syntax to express UI. I am curious why you are so strongly against using a DSL.

      This topic comes up often, so I wrote a blog post explaining why I think a DSL is a good fit: https://slint.dev/blog/domain-specific-language-vs-imperativ...

      • OtomotO7 minutes ago
        I'd like to have non-imperative gui code in Rust.

        Why Rust? Because I like its power and with recent developments such as subsecond the compile times are absolutely negligible.

    • goku124 hours ago
      You basically preempted nearly every single option, including an incumbent one. I don't believe it's fair to judge Rust based on its compatibility with Qt alone - something written in C++. Nothing against C++, but it's harder to get C++ and Rust to work together. You haven't addressed Iced yet, though going by your requirements, you're unlikely to be satisfied by it as well. Iced is not there yet, but it is the native GUI toolkit of the Cosmic desktop.
    • dancemethis4 hours ago
      I kept forgetting Narrator is a Windows program, and the post read like the author was referring to the "Narrator voice in their head" while testing the UIs.

      It made the post more amusing, actually. I sighed when I saw "Windows Narrator" suddenly.

  • godelski4 hours ago
    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.

    • gf0002 hours ago
      But.. why? Like I do get the occasional need where it's easier to just see an html page in the terminal, but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks with a huge amount of overhead, over having a real buffer and just writing pixels to it, with actual hardware acceleration?
    • miguel_martin4 minutes ago
      Not rust, but check out nimwave: https://github.com/ansiwave/nimwave
    • awesomeusername4 hours ago
      Browsh [0] - it runs firefox headless, and renders everything to ascii in the terminal

      It's glorious

      [0] https://www.brow.sh/

    • be_erik4 hours ago
      I use this one pretty often. It’s great. https://chawan.net/
      • godelski3 hours ago
        This actually looks pretty reasonable. Thanks! I'll definitely be giving it a try
    • littlestymaar2 hours ago
      > I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal.

      You can already do this, since the 90s: Lynx[1] and w3m[2] have both existed for more than three decades at this point.

      [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

      [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m

    • an hour ago
      undefined
    • globular-toastan hour ago
      Why would you want to live in a terminal? That's extremely limiting. What you really want is Emacs. Emacs has both a TUI web browser (EWW) and info browser already. You can even run vim in Emacs if you want, either the "real" (and inferior) thing via vterm, or use evil mode or another modal mode for Emacs like god mode.
    • fruitworks4 hours ago
      the cursive tui library does some html rendering

      https://sr.ht/~ireas/cursive-markup-rs/

      the whole cursive library strikes me as very html-like in layout

  • vinhnx16 minutes ago
    I’ve been experimenting with a coding agent project [0], and ratatui-rs became my framework of choice for building its first TUI. [1] The framework now ships with native list view support and improved terminal capabilities, including smoother mouse interaction and text selection.

    [0] https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode

    [1] https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui

  • nhatcher2 hours ago
    (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.

  • omarvanez6 hours ago
    I've seen lots of TUIs lately, why is that? What is the renewed interest?

    The only places I know of is Awesome TUIs [0] and terminaltrove [1]

    I can also see that Ratatui has an awesome list too [2].

    [0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

    [1] https://terminaltrove.com/

    [2] https://github.com/ratatui-org/awesome-ratatui

    • laserbeam5 hours ago
      > What is the renewed interest?

      We just don’t have good desktop GUI platforms anymore. Qt and GTK are massive beasts, Windows changes theirs every 4 years (and no one wants to be tied to a single platform anyway), we don’t want to deal with Electron, and writing your own GUI from scratch is hard.

      Terminals just got good lately and it’s way easier to make something higher quality in them than as a GUI. It’s just too hard to make a good small desktop app.

      It’s the same reason why it’s easier to make something look great with LEGO than if you want to mold clay. I’d also wager that devs today on average know more about good UX than devs did back in the 80s when clunky terminal apps used to be made.

      • dualogy3 hours ago
        Godot is neat for personal tool-making where I just need a small gui with basic controls and can express the whole proggie in just GdScript (API has sufficient OS interactions for most needs), I just whip it out for those when I otherwise don't really use it anymore, just keeping it around for that. Stuff like that: https://postimg.cc/VJc0pWbB
    • genidoi5 hours ago
      TUI libraries have sufficiently abstracted away the low-level quirks of terminal rendering that the terminal has become something like a canvas[0] available in the IDE with no extensions. This is quite a nice DevX if you want to display the state of an app that does something to data, without writing the necessary plumbing to pipe that data to a browser and render it.

      [0] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples...

      • flomo4 hours ago
        The low-level terminal stuff is still grody as hell. Years ago, HN had some blogposts from someone who was rethinking the whole stack, but I dunno what happened to that project. If people really like TUIs, eventually they're going to stop doing the 1980s throback stuff.
        • crazyloglad2 hours ago
          It's still around. Still doing its thing. One developer drafted a backend to ratatui for it, but he's been silent lately. I'm only marginally interested in that angle as its endgame "just" lands in TurboVision but Rust! and having to stay compatible with the feature-set of terminal emulation defeats the point.
      • eschaton5 hours ago
        They did this in the 1970s and 1980s too, then they were called “forms libraries” but were often full application frameworks in ways that would be familiar to modern developers of native graphical apps.
    • webnrrd2k5 hours ago
      I think that a lot of people here at HN have had bad web interfaces and GUIs inflicted on them for a long time, that a TUI is a welcome change and a big improvement. TUIs are limited, which make it hard to create great interfaces; but those limits also make it hard to create really bad interfaces. Also the TUI is genuinely good at simple-to-moderate complexity software. For an example, try out Midnight Commander.
    • J_Shelby_Jan hour ago
      Idk, I see it them all the time on the rust subreddit. Like, cool, but my friend, I have like ten brain cells and all of them are in overdrive. I’m not going to remember I have your TUI app installed AND remember the commands to make it work. If I have to use a CLI I just save the command I need in a text file so I don’t have to look them up. Just give me ang button any where. I’m not picky.
    • alwillis4 hours ago
      > I've seen lots of TUIs lately, why is that? What is the renewed interest?

      A few reasons:

      - for the most part TUI apps are cross-platform: macOS, Linux, BSD, Windows

      - they cut down on context switching. If you're already in the terminal, you shouldn't have to switch to a GUI app to check on something.

      - Today's terminal emulators—Ghostty, WezTerm, Kitty, iTerm, Alacrity, etc.—are fast and capable with GPU acceleration, 24-bit color support running on high resolution displays. It makes for a compelling platform to code for.

      - Anecdotally lots of developers are spending less time in IDEs and more time in the terminal using Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, etc.

    • travisgriggs4 hours ago
      > What is the renewed interest?

      For me, often, it’s an escape for a GUI world taken over by out-of-control “design” tenets. I value good Ux design concerns, but often working with designers lately feels bureaucratic, at times cargo culting, and overly spacious.

      It’s like a graphical form of “I didn’t have time to give you a short answer, so I gave you a long one instead”. TUIs force a paucity that often makes for a nice information/pixels ratio.

    • pixelready10 minutes ago
      Yeah I think it’s the software equivalent of “go back to the land” type movements. Resurgence of Linux tiling window managers, NeoVim, TUIs. Everything in web and Electron land feels busy, attention grabbing, and bloated. Heck, even VSCode’s defaults are a kind of cluttered.

      I for one love the tranquility of a dark mode terminal and find it quite pleasant with a nice nerd font, a pretty color scheme, a single high resolution monitor and an ergonomic keyboard. I feel much more connected to the code or data I’m interacting with in that space. Trying to live there as much as I can lately. JiraTui has been great for preventing context switching at work.

    • lynndotpy5 hours ago
      In addition to other comments, it's the only real way to make a usable GUI-like experience over SSH.
      • vostok5 hours ago
        I've generally had good experiences with the various compressed X11-like tools. One example is x2go, but there are a few.
        • fragmede5 hours ago
          oh man, I haven't thought about xpra in a while! Xpra was a layer of indirection between X clients and X server so you could ssh in, run eg firefox, disconnect, and then reconnect and pick up Firefox where you left it.
      • MangoToupe5 hours ago
        You can also serve a window server over ssh
    • mendelmaleh2 hours ago
      The main reason for me is simple keyboard navigation. I don't want to click through links and menus, I don't want to use the mouse at all. I think that's also why tiling window managers are popular again.
    • serial_dev2 hours ago
      My theory, web apps are extremely bloated and slow, teams behind it always “optimize” and switch things up, and desktop apps are usually just wrapped web apps. TUI developers don’t mind settling and not always messing up the product and they keep the TUI “lean and mean”. Some users appreciate fast, simple UIs and they don’t want to be constantly A/B tested on only for the core experience to break all the time.
    • Szpadel4 hours ago
      i think this might be caused by codex. it's open source, many people use it and it uses ratatui. People check how it is implemented and discover ratatui.

      I believe this might be current most popular application using this library.

      I'm surprised it isn't included in this showcase

      • mock-possum3 hours ago
        Or Claude. There are more than a few developers on my team that prefer terminal interface for their codegen chatbots.
    • CSSer5 hours ago
      That's a big question. I think TUIs are great for glue processes, and it doesn't hurt when they look pretty. They're also excellent first projects with composable interfaces. Shell code is such a pain. It's quick and dirty, but there are a lot of footguns. The main challenge is reducing the friction of making a TUI to the point where it's easy to execute an idea, and a lot of frameworks do this really well. Add the proliferation of LLMs on top, and maybe that could explain it?
    • tptacek5 hours ago
      High-level languages that compile to single binaries, and very good TUI frameworks (maybe inspired by Python Textual?) for them.
    • DC-35 hours ago
      The terminal remains an extremely compelling computing environment in spite of its limitations and fifty years of technical debt. As anachronistic as arcane escape codes and box drawing characters seem in $CURRENT_YEAR, the fact remains that nothing has arisen to fill its niche.
    • orbital-decay5 hours ago
      They're easier to program and seamlessly integrate into the terminal. That's basically it, other than that they're worse than normal GUIs. Also, GUI frameworks aren't that mature in Rust in particular.
    • positron264 hours ago
      Unrelated to the article, a lot of my millennials could see web and then mobile coming, focused on web & mobile, and as a result just weren't really participating in C and C++ development. We used terminal applications leftover from peak GNU.

      When Rust came along and presented a career opportunity, terminal apps was a great way to get into it and filled a gap in a lot of people's skill sets. Even when building GUI apps in Rust, your first entry point is a CLI usually.

      We took our UX thinking from web & mobile and remixed it with Rust and new ideas came out. Turns out "If it aint broke don't fix it" for two decades can build up a lot of evolutionary pressure.

    • morkalork5 hours ago
      IMO it's like seeing kids bust out disposable kodak cameras at the bar: generational nostalgia
      • baq3 hours ago
        TUIs being designed by engineers for engineers make them rather timeless. Extra points for being keyboard-first: lots of modern GUI tools don’t even consider the keyboard for anything other than text input, to the point that even tab order is broken, if it works at all, or the escape key closes multiple stacked modal windows, or enter doesn’t submit the dialog, or…
      • backscratches3 hours ago
        TUIs work better than GUIs. So much more powerful with so many less resources.
    • nurettin5 hours ago
      I don't care much about forms and windows in the command line (I've had enough of turbo vision back in the 90s), but I don't think I am alone in wanting to see some progress bars and stats for long running processes. So 2% of these libraries is actually pretty useful.
  • palata2 hours ago
    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.

    • nhatcheran hour ago
      Hmm, that sounds bad. Were you running the debug build? Like just running 'cargo run'?
  • nhatcheran hour ago
    Related from yesterday:

    Bluetui – A TUI for managing Bluetooth on Linux

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45817114 https://github.com/pythops/bluetui

  • discoinverno3 hours ago
    Shameless plug of my TUI game, also built with Ratatui

    https://github.com/ricott1/rebels-in-the-sky

    • benrutteran hour ago
      > P2P terminal game about spacepirates playing basketball across the galaxy

      Absolutely fantastic description right there.

  • CSSer6 hours ago
    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.
    • AceJohnny24 hours ago
      Rust, following Go's footsteps, has made it very easy to distribute-and-compile from source. They've taken all the pain out of the compiling-from-source pipeline, through "go build" or "cargo build"

      Meanwhile, distributions sometimes maintain their plodding rate at package updates (usually handled by distribution volunteers, not the original program's developers), which was developed in an era when building from source was a tedious process where the distribution volunteers provided value.

      In effect, build-from-source has taken over "just use the distribution package".

      • mariusor14 minutes ago
        > In effect, build-from-source has taken over "just use the distribution package".

        Not in the real world, where most of the useful software is not in fact written in Rust, nor Go for that matter.

      • skydhashan hour ago
        The reason for the rate of updates is isially for one reason: Trust and Stability. Instead of trusting a myriad people all over the world to do their job well, I trust one team to ensure that all the tools I need do run well.

        And in the Unix world, build from source can be pretty easy. When it’s hard, it’s usually the project’s fault (Firefox, Electron,..).

      • smartmic2 hours ago
        The reason I was put off by Rust was compiling from source. I experimented with a ports collection package management system similar to those used in BSD a while ago, and every time a Rust program needed to be compiled, I could go to sleep; no, basically rendering the system unusable. It was like the dependency abyss of NPM combined with the worst possible compile times, even worse than C++.
      • CSSer3 hours ago
        Okay, but where do you put it? I mean, yes, I know there's /usr/local/bin and /opt/bin, but why do I have to compile then mv it myself? It's a small paper cut. Does cargo or go have a global build command? That would be a nice all-in-one. And why should I have to download the source code if, honestly, I don't care as long as it works? Nah, I don't think build from source has taken over at all. It's 2025 and I use a package manager (or three) on every major operating system across multiple languages. It's because, as a vendor experience, I can one-line and use just about anything.
        • dwattttt2 hours ago
          If you have the Rust toolchain installed, installing is as simple as e.g.:

            cargo install ripgrep
          which will result in ripgrep being downloaded, compiled, and copied to a per user directory that's included on PATH as part of the toolchain.

          EDIT: Which is what I'm doing right now for a few of these that caught my eye.

  • eric-burel2 hours ago
    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.
  • dkdcio6 hours ago
    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
    • wrs5 hours ago
      I think they're saying this crate is why Rust is experiencing a TUI revolution.

      Charm would probably say the same for Go.

      • qudat5 hours ago
        Charm was my introduction into the world of ssh apps which prompted me to create https://pico.sh

        SSH apps serve a similar UX to web apps which I just think is a great idea for many use cases. Needing to install a cli tool just to upload some files is tedious when you can just use rsync, sftp, piping, or even sshfs

        • kstrauser3 hours ago
          What’s an SSH app vs a terminal app?
          • moooo992 hours ago
            A terminal app is running during an interactive shell session. A ssh app basically allows you to SSH into the app, without ever ending up in the shell.

            A fun example of this is https://www.terminal.shop/

            • hnlmorg2 hours ago
              Any terminal app can be an “ssh app”. There isn’t really a distinction.
    • tomhow4 hours ago
      We've updated the title.

      Submitters, please remember this from the guidelines:

      ... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

    • airstrike5 hours ago
      ratatui has been around for quite a bit. it's what I'll reach out for if I need semi-complex TUIs in Rust fwiw
    • dkdcio6 hours ago
      I am also now curious about alternatives/what differentiates this crate
  • pjmlp2 hours ago
    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.

  • mbm4 hours ago
    Ratatui is awesome! Just built a little chat client with it, tons of fun.

    https://terma.mattmay.dev/

  • jossephus012 hours ago
    Nice. It would be also cool if they add 'cargo install %tool%' commands for each one.
  • submeta2 hours ago
    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

  • siavosh5 hours ago
    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.
    • bitexploder5 hours ago
      I like smaller more focused tools on the terminal. You can make these all work together pretty reasonably with a little glue. Hurl, mitmproxy, httpie with http-prompt. I tend to prefer mitmproxy sessions and massaging that with Python/curl as needed for repeating and tweaking. User friendly is relative, but these tools work well. Python for tweaking http streams in mitmproxy is powerful and rather friendly for what you get in return. Mitmproxy lets you easily save flows with a bit of Puthon glue to output httpie commands giving history, and you can save mitmproxy sessions.
    • seabrookmx5 hours ago
      I also have this question!

      I starred Posting[1] but haven't yet got around to trying it.

      [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40926211

      Edit: here's another one: https://github.com/LucasPickering/slumber

    • esafak4 hours ago
      xh has sessions. https://github.com/ducaale/xh
    • tcoff915 hours ago
      Kulala nvim plugin or emacs rest client
  • nullbyte8085 hours ago
    Very dope. I really like dua as my mac only has 256 GB.
  • ModernMech5 hours ago
    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.
  • renewiltord4 hours ago
    Oh good collection. This is good. Found lots of good tools here.
  • MangoToupe5 hours ago
    Not only is the language irrelevant, but anyone pimping vt100 as a ui should be shot on site. If you must use the terminal, use bash. If you must make a ui use a proper ui!
    • rireads3 hours ago
      Why do you think there is not a sweetspot between cli and gui?