pokeductor 0.1.0

A terminal-based Pokedex and Evolution Analyzer powered by PokeAPI
pokeductor-0.1.0 is not a library.

Pokeductor

A retro terminal Pokédex & Evolution Analyzer, powered by PokeAPI.

Browse every species, read localized Pokédex entries, study branching evolution chains as connected sprite cards — all rendered with Unicode half-blocks in a warm, PICO-8-inspired palette. Built in Rust with ratatui.

Rust ratatui Async License

✨ Features

  • Full Pokédex — every species from PokeAPI, searchable and filterable in real time.
  • Sprite rendering in the terminal — official artwork drawn with Unicode upper-half-blocks (two pixels per character cell), cropped to its opaque bounds, area-averaged on downscale and alpha-blended over the panel so edges stay clean.
  • Interactive evolution graph — focus the evolution panel and the chain is laid out as connected sprite cards (branching chains like Eevee included). Hop to any stage with a keypress to instantly inspect a Pokémon's next evolution.
  • Info cards — national Pokédex number, genus, flavor-text blurb, and Legendary / Mythical / Baby badges for each species.
  • 6 interface languages — English, Türkçe, Deutsch, Français, Español, Italiano, switchable live from a little picker card.
  • Localized Pokédex text — flavor/genus come straight from PokeAPI in EN/DE/FR/ES/IT; for languages PokeAPI doesn't carry (Turkish), the English entry is machine-translated on demand and cached.
  • Responsive layout — every panel reflows to the terminal size; sprites scale to fit.
  • Snappy & async — all network I/O runs on tokio tasks; the UI never blocks, and each species is fetched at most once per session.

📸 Screenshots

🚀 Getting started

Requirements

  • Rust (stable, 2021 edition) — install via rustup.
  • A truecolor (24-bit) terminal for the sprite colors (most modern terminals qualify).
  • A font with Unicode block + box-drawing glyphs (e.g. any Nerd Font, Fira Code, JetBrains Mono).
  • An internet connection (data is fetched live from PokeAPI).

Build & run

# Clone, then from the project root:
cargo run --release

The first launch fetches the species list; selecting a Pokémon loads its details, evolution chain, and artwork on demand.

⌨️ Controls

Context Key Action
List ↑ / ↓ · j / k Move selection
PgUp / PgDn Jump 10
Enter Load the highlighted Pokémon
/ or Tab Focus the search box
E Focus the evolution panel
L Open the language picker
Q / Esc Quit
Search type Filter the list
Enter Load result & return to list
Esc / Tab Back to list
Evolution ← → ↑ ↓ · h j k l Move between chain members
Enter Jump to the highlighted evolution
Esc / Tab Back to list
Language card ↑ / ↓ Move selection
Enter / Space Apply
Esc Cancel
Anywhere Ctrl-C Quit

🏗️ Architecture

A small, layered design — the rendering layer is pure functions of application state, and all network work happens off the UI thread.

Module Responsibility
main.rs Entry point; sets up the terminal and the tokio runtime.
models.rs API-agnostic domain types (PokemonDetail, EvolutionTree, Sprite).
api.rs Async PokeAPI client, evolution-chain parser, sprite decode, translation.
app.rs State machine + tokio::select! event loop (input · messages · animation tick).
ui.rs All ratatui rendering, including the sprite & evolution-graph drawing.
i18n.rs Language enum + translation tables for the 6 UI languages.
theme.rs PICO-8-inspired palette and per-type accent colors.

How it works

  • Concurrency model. Background fetch tasks are producers that send [Message]s over an mpsc channel; the main loop is the single consumer, draining the channel alongside terminal input and a steady animation tick via tokio::select!. The UI thread never blocks on I/O.
  • Caching. Details, evolution chains, decoded sprites, and machine translations are each cached in-memory and keyed by name, so a given Pokémon (or translation) is fetched at most once per session.
  • Sprite pipeline. PNG → decode to RGBA (image) → crop to opaque bounds → box-average downscale (keeping aspect, accounting for ~2:1 cell height) → alpha-blend over the panel → emit ▀ half-block cells (fg = top pixel, bg = bottom pixel).
  • Alternate forms. Forms like raichu-alola resolve their species/evolution data via the base species name from the Pokémon payload, so they don't 404.

Built with

ratatui · crossterm · tokio · reqwest · serde · image · anyhow · thiserror

🌍 Localization & translation

  • UI strings live in i18n.rs — add a language by extending the Language enum, Language::ALL, and adding a Strings table.
  • Pokédex flavor text and genus come from PokeAPI in en, de, fr, es, it.
  • For UI languages PokeAPI has no text for (Turkish), the English blurb is translated on demand through the free, key-less MyMemory API and cached. Translation is best-effort: if the service errors or is rate-limited, the original English text is shown.

🙏 Credits

  • Data & sprites: PokeAPI (please respect their fair-use policy).
  • Translations fallback: MyMemory.
  • Pokémon is © Nintendo / Game Freak / The Pokémon Company. This is a non-commercial, educational project.

📄 License

MIT — see LICENSE (add one if you haven't yet).