Ratatui Kit

Terminal UI. Composed.

Build with components. Think in state. A Rust terminal UI framework built on Ratatui and Tokio.

Documentation · Quick Start · Components · Examples · Ecosystem · 简体中文

Overview

Ratatui Kit adds components, props, hooks, routing, input layers, and theming to Rust terminal applications. Ratatui draws the interface. Tokio drives async work. The framework manages component lifetimes, retained state, and reactive rendering.

• Describe the interface with #[component] and element!. Compose layouts and embed native Ratatui widgets.
• Organize state with hooks for local state, futures, and effects. Opt into atoms for shared state.
• Build the application with routes, isolated input layers, and palettes that coordinate the whole interface.

The pixel terminal assembler reflects Ratatui’s terminal culture and this framework’s component layer. See the brand assets for the character source and usage guidelines.

See it running

The website includes real terminal recordings with playback controls. Clone this repository to run the same examples locally:

• Features
• Quick start
• Built-in components and hooks
• Feature flags
• Documentation and examples
• Ecosystem
• Design goals
• Contributing
• License

Features

• Declarative components: write terminal UI trees with element!, including first-class if, if let, for, and match control flow inside child blocks.
• React-style hooks: use local state, futures, effects, memoized values, context, terminal size, lifecycle cleanup, and input handlers in component functions.
• State retention by identity: the runtime reuses component instances across frames using ElementKey + TypeId, preserving hook slots and local state when identity stays stable.
• Waker-driven rendering: state writes wake the render loop instead of requiring manual redraw calls.
• Async-native runtime: the terminal loop runs on Tokio, so components can spawn futures and react to async work naturally.
• Flex-style layout: LayoutStyle maps common layout concepts (flex_direction, justify_content, gap, margin, offset, width, height) to Ratatui layout primitives.
• Unified theming: a shared Palette is the single color source, and every component derives its styles from it via a per-component FooTheme. Recolor globally with PaletteProvider, override one component type with ThemeOverride, or drive the palette from an Atom to re-theme at runtime.
• Central input routing: InputRuntime, InputLayer, EventScope, EventPriority, and EventResult make modals and edit modes block background shortcuts cleanly.
• Local and global state: use component-local State<T> for local lifetimes and Atom<T> for process-wide shared state.
• Built-in router: RouterProvider, Outlet, routes!, use_navigate, use_route, and use_params are available behind the router feature.
• Native widget escape hatch: use widget(expr) and stateful(widget, state) to embed existing Ratatui widgets directly.
• Small default dependency surface: the default feature set is empty; opt into router, atom, input, tree, table, virtual-list, serde, or full as needed. The theming protocol is always-on with no extra dependency.

Quick start

Install the crate:

cargo add ratatui-kit

Or let Cargo add the full feature set:

cargo add ratatui-kit --features full

This writes a dependency entry like:

[dependencies]
ratatui-kit = { version = "...", features = ["full"] }
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["rt-multi-thread", "macros", "time"] }

The default feature set is intentionally empty. Enable only the capabilities you need, or use full for examples and prototypes.

Counter example

use ratatui_kit::{
    crossterm::event::{Event, KeyCode, KeyEventKind},
    prelude::*,
    ratatui::{
        layout::{Constraint, Direction, Flex},
        style::{Style, Stylize},
        text::Line,
    },
};

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
    element!(Counter)
        .fullscreen()
        .await
        .expect("failed to run the application");
}

#[component]
fn Counter(mut hooks: Hooks) -> impl Into<AnyElement<'static>> {
    let mut count = hooks.use_state(|| 0_u64);

    hooks.use_future(async move {
        loop {
            tokio::time::sleep(std::time::Duration::from_secs(1)).await;
            count += 1;
        }
    });

    let mut exit = hooks.use_exit();
    hooks.use_event_handler(EventScope::Current, EventPriority::Normal, move |event| {
        let Event::Key(key) = event else {
            return EventResult::Ignored;
        };
        if key.kind == KeyEventKind::Press
            && matches!(key.code, KeyCode::Char('q') | KeyCode::Char('Q'))
        {
            exit();
            return EventResult::Consumed;
        }
        EventResult::Ignored
    });

    element!(
        Center(width: Constraint::Length(48), height: Constraint::Length(9)) {
            Border(
                flex_direction: Direction::Vertical,
                justify_content: Flex::Center,
                border_style: Style::new().cyan(),
                top_title: Line::from(" ratatui-kit counter ").cyan().bold().centered(),
                bottom_title: Line::from(" q quit | Ctrl+C exit ").dark_gray().centered(),
            ) {
                Text(text: Line::styled(
                    format!("Counter: {:02}", count.get()),
                    Style::new().green().bold(),
                ).centered())
            }
        }
    )
}

Run the example from this repository:

cargo run --example counter

AI-assisted development

Ratatui Kit ships an AI agent skill — a packaged knowledge base that teaches your AI coding assistant the framework's real components, props, and hooks, the element! macro, input layers, and the router — so you can ask it to "build me a terminal todo app" and get code that compiles and follows the framework's idioms, instead of guessed APIs.

npx skills add yexiyue/ratatui-kit --skill ratatui-kit

The skill lives in skills/ratatui-kit/ and your assistant consults it automatically. Pair it with the general-purpose rust-best-practices and rust-async-patterns skills for Rust-level correctness. See AI-assisted development for the full guide.

Built-in components and hooks

README keeps the API overview intentionally compact. See the documentation site and docs.rs for signatures and deeper examples.

Components

You can also bridge any native Ratatui widget with widget(expr) or stateful(widget, state).

Hooks

Procedural macros

element! · #[component] · #[derive(Props)] · routes! (router) · #[with_layout_style]

Feature flags

The textarea feature is currently disabled during the Ratatui 0.30 migration because tui-textarea does not yet provide a compatible release.

Documentation and examples

• Learning path
• Quick start
• Installation and feature flags
• Hooks
• State model
• Theming
• Routing
• Built-in components
• Examples
• Simplified Chinese docs
• DeepWiki

Selected runnable examples:

cargo run --example counter        # local state + async updates
cargo run --example atom_state     # global atom state
cargo run --example router         # RouterProvider and nested Outlet
cargo run --example modal          # modal input isolation
cargo run --example table          # data table with wrapping + highlights
cargo run --example todo_app       # full workflow: state, input, routing, modals

hello_world          counter              async_state          atom_state
router               control_flow         input_mutex          input
search_input         scrollview           wrapped_text         modal
confirm_modal        alert_modal          shortcut_info_modal  select
multi_select         tree_select          table                 virtual_list
virtual_multi_select custom_widget        custom_hook           custom_provider
todo_app

Some examples require optional features such as input, tree, table, virtual-list, or router. Running examples from this repository uses the workspace configuration and enables full.

Ecosystem

Beyond the built-in components, ratatui-kit has a growing ecosystem of third-party component crates, published independently as ratatui-kit-<name>. They depend only on the stable Extension API and do not need to be merged into this repo, so the core stays small.

• Find components — search the ratatui-kit keyword on crates.io, or browse awesome-ratatui-kit.
• Write your own — scaffold from the component template (cargo generate yexiyue/ratatui-kit-component-template) and follow the Component Guide.
• Official extensions live in ratatui-kit-contrib (e.g. ratatui-kit-markdown — Markdown / code-block / diff / blockquote / divider).

Design goals

Ratatui Kit is inspired by React, iocraft, and ink, but stays close to Rust and Ratatui:

• Declarative: describe what the UI should look like instead of mutating terminal buffers by hand.
• Reactive: state changes wake the runtime, and the framework reconciles the component tree for the next frame.
• Async-first: timers, IO, and background tasks fit into component lifetimes through Tokio.
• Composable: the built-in components stay business-neutral; application-specific behavior belongs in your own hooks, providers, and components.
• Escape-friendly: when a native Ratatui widget is the right tool, embed it directly.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome.

Before sending a PR, run the same validation matrix used by CI:

cargo fmt --all --check
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features --workspace -- -D warnings
cargo test --locked --all-features --workspace --lib --tests --examples
RUSTDOCFLAGS="-D warnings" cargo doc --no-deps --document-private-items --all-features --workspace --examples

This repository uses lefthook for local pre-commit checks.

License

Ratatui Kit is released under the MIT License.

Mouse interactions: cargo run --example mouse. Enable capture with fullscreen_with(RunOptions { mouse: true }). See Pointer Events.