Ratatui Kit

Build component-driven terminal UIs in Rust with React-style components, hooks, props, routing, input layers, and global state. Powered by Ratatui and Tokio.

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

Overview

Ratatui Kit is a component framework for terminal UIs built on top of Ratatui. It brings familiar frontend ideas - components, props, hooks, context, routing, and scoped global state - into Rust terminal applications without hiding the underlying Ratatui drawing model.

If you know React, the mental model should feel familiar:

• element! gives you JSX-like declarative UI syntax.
• #[component] turns a function into a reusable component.
• use_state, use_future, use_async_state, use_effect, and use_context organize state and side effects.
• RouterProvider, Outlet, and routes! model multi-page terminal apps.
• Atom and use_atom provide process-wide reactive state behind the atom feature.

Ratatui gives you the terminal canvas and widgets. Ratatui Kit adds component identity, state retention, reconciliation, input routing, and async-aware rendering.

• Features
• Quick start
• Built-in components and hooks
• Feature flags
• Documentation and examples
• 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.
• 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, virtual-list, or full as needed.

Quick start

Install the crate:

cargo add ratatui-kit

Or enable feature flags explicitly in Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
ratatui-kit = { version = "0.6.0", 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 https://github.com/yexiyue/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
• 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 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          virtual_list         virtual_multi_select
custom_widget        custom_hook          custom_provider      todo_app

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

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.