Intuitive

Intuitive is a component-based library for creating text-based user interfaces (TUIs) easily.

It is heavily inspired by React and SwiftUI, containing features that resemble functional components, hooks, and a (mostly) declarative DSL.

Check out the Getting Started section below for a brief introduction to using Intuitive.

Design

The main focus of Intuitive is to simplify the implementation of section-based TUIs, such as lazygit's. Resizing is handled automatically, and keyboard events can be handled easily.

For example, a complex layout with an input box:

use intuitive::{
component,
components::{Centered, Flex::*, Section, Text, VStack, HStack},
error::Result,
on_key, render,
state::use_state,
terminal::Terminal,
};

#[component(Root)]
fn render() {
let text = use_state(|| String::new());
let on_key = on_key! { [text]
KeyEvent { code: Char(c), .. } => text.mutate(|text| text.push(c)),
KeyEvent { code: Backspace, .. } => text.mutate(|text| text.pop()),
KeyEvent { code: Esc, .. } => event::quit(),
};

render! {
VStack(flex: [Block(3), Grow(1)], on_key) {
Section(title: "Input") {
Text(text: text.get())
}

HStack(flex: [1, 2, 3]) {
Section(title: "Column 1")
Section(title: "Column 2")
Section(title: "Column 3")
}
}
}
}

fn main() -> Result<()> {
Terminal::new(Root::new())?.run()
}

And the output would look like this:

Getting Started

Similarly to React, Intuitive is built around components that are composable. There is one root component, that is passed to Terminal::new(), in order to run the TUI.

There are two main ways to build components:

• Functional components using the component attribute macro
• Custom components by implementing Component and (potentially Element)

Both of these are discussed in depth in the components module documentation. Other useful resources are:

• The recipes section of the components module documentation, describing ways to achieve common UI interactions.
• The examples directory in the repository, which contains complete examples of simple applications.

Disclaimer

Intuitive is really new and is missing some core features, such as a good story around styling components, and coloring text in general. There may also be some bugs in the library of components, please raise an issue if you find any. Furthermore, since a large and complex application has yet to be built using Intuitive, it is not a guarantee that it does not have some major flaw making such development difficult.