🎞️ animate

Lightweight Rust animation library with tweening and physics-based springs

Features

• Lightweight: Zero dependencies by default.
• Ergonomic: Macro-driven API with minimal boilerplate.
• Extensible: Many built-in types with support for custom interpolators.
• Animation modes: once, cycle, alternate.
• Easing: Built-in and custom easing functions.
• Physics-based: Supports spring animations.
• Ratatui-friendly: Interpolators for ratatui types, gated behind the ratatui feature flag.

Installation

cargo add animate

Getting started

Add #[animate] to a struct and mark the fields you want to animate:

#[animate]
pub struct MyWidget {
    #[tween(duration = 300)]
    progress: f64,

    #[tween(mode = "cycle", duration = 400, easing = cubic_in)]
    color: Color,

    #[tween(mode = "alternate", duration = 500, easing = quad_in_out)]
    status: String,
}

By default the macro generates an update method named animate. It must be called at the top of your struct's render method.

#[animate]
pub struct MyWidget { ... }

impl MyWidget {
    pub fn draw(&mut self, frame: &mut Frame) {
        self.animate();

        // rest of your code
    }
}

If the name conflicts with an existing method, rename it:

#[animate(update = "update_animations")]
pub struct MyWidget { ... }

Next, place animate::tick() before your struct's update call at the start of each frame:

let mut widget = MyWidget::new(...);

loop {
    animate::tick(tickrate);
    terminal.draw(|frame| {
        widget.draw(frame);
    })?;
}

Use get() to read and set() to write animated fields.

Minimal example

use animate::animate;
use std::{io::{stdout, Write}, thread, time::Duration};

#[animate]
struct Counter {
    #[tween(duration = 400)]
    value: u32,
}

fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    let mut c = Counter::new(0);

    loop {
        animate::tick(8);  // advance global frame time by frame delta (ms)
        c.animate();       // update all animated fields

        let v = *c.value;
        if v == 0 {
            c.value.set(100);
        }

        print!("\rCounter value: {v}");
        stdout().flush()?;

        if v == 100 {
            break;
        }

        thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(8));
    }

    Ok(())
}

Animation modes

Fields

#[tween(duration = 300, easing = quad_in_out, interp = my_interp_fn)]

Built-in easing functions

linear, quad_in, quad_out, quad_in_out, cubic_in, cubic_out, cubic_in_out

Spring animations

In addition to time-based animations, or Tweens, animate also supports physics-based spring animations.

#[animate]
pub struct Widget {
    #[spring(stiffness = 200.0, damping = 20.0, mass = 1.0)]
    x: f64,
}

Custom types

impl animate::Tween for MyColor {
    fn lerp(start: &Self, end: &Self, t: f64) -> Self {
        MyColor {
            r: u8::lerp(&start.r, &end.r, t),
            g: u8::lerp(&start.g, &end.g, t),
            b: u8::lerp(&start.b, &end.b, t),
        }
    }
}