rtb-tui

Part of the phpboyscout Rust toolkit — small, framework-free crates extracted from rust-tool-base.

Reusable TUI widgets for CLI tools: a multi-step interactive Wizard with escape-to-back navigation (backed by inquire), uniform structured-output helpers (render_table / render_json) for a --output text|json flag, and a TTY-aware Spinner that no-ops when stderr isn't a terminal.

use rtb_tui::{render_table, render_json};
use serde::Serialize;
use tabled::Tabled;

#[derive(Tabled, Serialize)]
struct Row { name: &'static str, count: u32 }

let rows = vec![Row { name: "alpha", count: 1 }];
print!("{}", render_table(&rows));          // psql-style text table
print!("{}", render_json(&rows).unwrap());  // pretty-printed JSON array

Documentation

• Build a three-step wizard — the tutorial, from an empty crate to a working program.
• How-to guides — output flags, progress reporting, exit codes, testing without a terminal.
• Reference — every public item, its defaults and its failure modes.
• What rtb-tui does not do — the limitations, before you plan around them.

This is not a full-screen terminal UI library. It draws no panels, has no event loop, and there is no ratatui in its dependency graph — it is three line-oriented widgets and nothing else.

• Docs site: https://tui.rust.phpboyscout.uk
• Generated API docs: https://docs.rs/rtb-tui
• Crate: https://crates.io/crates/rtb-tui

Development

just ci runs the full local gate (fmt, clippy, nextest, doc, deny). All tests run headless — no TTY required. Releases are cut by release-plz from Conventional Commits — do not tag manually.

License

MIT