ratada

A reusable ratatui widget toolkit for Rust terminal apps.

ratada provides the generic building blocks for a TUI over ratatui and crossterm: a terminal guard and event loop, modals, forms, text editing, pickers, tables, trees, a fuzzy finder, a help overlay, footers and status bars, plus a framework-agnostic theming layer (colors, palette, glyphs and layout mode) that maps onto ratatui styles.

Overview

• Driver – a Tui RAII terminal guard (raw mode + alternate screen) and a generic run loop over a Screen trait.
• Widgets – modals (confirm, select, multi_select, number_input, message), forms, single- and multi-line text editing with a shared editor core, autocomplete, tables, trees, tabs, pagers, gauges, spinners, toasts.
• Pickers – color, date, date-range, month and path pickers.
• Theming – a Skin bundling a Palette (semantic colors), Glyphs (Unicode/ASCII variants) and a layout Mode; framework-agnostic so a CLI can share it, with a single ratatui adapter in style.

Usage

[dependencies]
ratada = "0.0.1"

Implement the Screen trait and hand it to run, which owns the draw/input loop inside a raw-mode Tui guard. The prelude re-exports the driver essentials:

use ratada::prelude::*;
use ratatui::{Frame, text::Line};
use crossterm::event::{KeyCode, KeyEvent};

struct App {
    count: u32,
}

impl Screen for App {
    type Error = std::io::Error;

    fn render(&self, frame: &mut Frame) {
        frame.render_widget(
            Line::from(format!("count: {}  (space +1, q quit)", self.count)),
            frame.area(),
        );
    }

    fn handle_key(&mut self, key: KeyEvent, _tui: &mut Tui) -> std::io::Result<Flow> {
        match key.code {
            KeyCode::Char('q') => Ok(Flow::Quit),
            KeyCode::Char(' ') => {
                self.count += 1;
                Ok(Flow::Continue)
            }
            _ => Ok(Flow::Continue),
        }
    }
}

fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    let mut tui = Tui::new()?;
    run(&mut tui, &mut App { count: 0 })
}

Widgets that support the opt-in boxed style take a BoxDecor (caption in the top border, an automatic or fixed badge bottom-right), e.g. InputField::new("").max_len(40).boxed(BoxDecor::new().caption("Name")).

Documentation

• API.md — a compact index of the public surface (rustdoc via cargo doc --open is the authoritative reference).
• DEVELOPMENT.md — module layout, conventions and how to add a widget.
• CLAUDE.md — the binding style guide.

License

MIT