Ratatui Kit

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

Documentation · Quick Start · Components · Examples · GitHub · Ecosystem

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, theming, 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, theming, and async-aware rendering.

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())
            }
        }
    )
}

Theming

Every built-in component reads its colors from a shared Palette; there is no hardcoded color. Tune the palette in one place and the whole tree re-colors:

use ratatui_kit::prelude::*;
use ratatui_kit::ratatui::style::Color;

let mut palette = Palette::default();
palette.accent = Color::Rgb(94, 175, 255);

// every component inside derives its styles from `palette`
let _themed = element!(PaletteProvider(palette: palette) {
    Text(text: "themed by the shared palette")
});

Per-call style props are Option<Style> (None = theme, Some(s) = patch over the theme, Some(Style::reset()) = clear). Re-style one component type with ThemeOverride::<BorderTheme>(theme: ...), and drive the palette from an Atom<Palette> to switch themes at runtime. See the Theming guide.

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, theming, 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

This overview is 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 theming protocol (Palette, ComponentTheme, PaletteProvider, ThemeOverride, and every FooTheme) is always-on and needs no feature flag. 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

The GitHub repository carries runnable examples — clone it and cargo run --example <name> (e.g. counter, atom_state, router, modal, table, theme, todo_app); the workspace 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 on GitHub. Before sending a PR, run the CI validation matrix (cargo fmt --all --check, cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features --workspace -- -D warnings, cargo test --locked --all-features --workspace --lib --tests --examples).

License

Ratatui Kit is released under the MIT License.