sparcli

A lightweight, cross-platform toolkit for styled CLI output and interactive input widgets in Rust. It renders directly to the terminal via crossterm (no ratatui dependency) but mirrors ratatui's familiar vocabulary (Style, Color, Span, Line, Text), so the API feels at home if you already use ratatui.

sparcli is meant for small, lightweight CLI tools: a single accent color, muted defaults, rounded borders, graceful NO_COLOR and non-terminal behavior. Heavy, full-screen/retained TUIs are out of scope (that is what ratatui is for).

Highlights

• Output: styled text, markup, tables (colspan, striping, wrap, titles), panels, alerts, rules, lists, trees, key-value lists, badges, progress bars, spinners, multi-progress, diffs, columns, live display, pager, and composition helpers (align, pad, vstack).
• Input: confirm, text (validation, char filters, history, ghost autocomplete), password, number (with a calculator), textarea, single/multi select, an inline fuzzy select, and a calendar date picker.
• Unified theme for input and output, set once and overridable per call.
• Robust: no panics on input, RAII terminal restore, Result-based errors.

Install

[dependencies]
sparcli = "0.2"
# Opt-in features (the base stays small):
# sparcli = { version = "0.2", features = ["markup", "fuzzy", "pager"] }

MSRV: Rust 1.88 (edition 2024).

From a local checkout or Git

To use an unpublished or local copy instead of the crates.io release, point Cargo at the source directory or repository:

[dependencies]
# Local path (absolute or relative to your Cargo.toml):
sparcli = { path = "../sparcli" }
# Straight from Git:
# sparcli = { git = "https://github.com/cgroening/rs-sparcli", branch = "main" }

Output example

use sparcli::prelude::*;
use sparcli::{Alert, Table};

fn main() -> sparcli::Result<()> {
    Alert::success("Build finished.").print()?;

    Table::new()
        .columns(["Name", "Status"])
        .row(["web-1", "online"])
        .row(["db-1", "online"])
        .striped(true)
        .print()?;
    Ok(())
}

Every output widget implements Renderable: call .print() to write to stdout, or .print_to(&mut writer) to capture output. When stdout is not a terminal (a pipe, a file, or with NO_COLOR), no escape codes are emitted.

Input example

use sparcli::validate::non_empty;
use sparcli::{Confirm, Outcome, TextInput};

fn main() -> sparcli::Result<()> {
    if let Outcome::Submitted(name) =
        TextInput::new("Your name?").validate(non_empty()).run()?
    {
        if let Outcome::Submitted(true) = Confirm::new("Continue?").run()? {
            println!("Hello, {name}!");
        }
    }
    Ok(())
}

Prompts return Outcome<T> (Submitted(value), Cancelled, or a fired Shortcut(id)) and never panic. They require an interactive terminal; without one they return SparcliError::NoTerminal.

Theming

use sparcli::{Color, Theme, set_theme};

let theme = Theme {
    accent: Color::Rgb(180, 142, 173),
    unicode: true, // set false for ASCII-only glyphs
    ..Theme::default()
};
set_theme(theme);

The same theme drives both output widgets and input prompts.

Examples

cargo run --example output_gallery --features markup,fuzzy,pager
cargo run --example output_dynamic --features pager  # spinner/progress/live
cargo run --example prompts --features fuzzy          # interactive; needs a TTY
cargo run --example output-readme --features markup   # screenshot collage
cargo run --example prompt-readme                     # non-interactive prompts

Documentation

• docs.rs/sparcli – the complete API reference (rustdoc, built with all features).
• DEVELOPMENT.md – building, testing and contributing.
• CHANGELOG.md – release notes.
• cargo doc --all-features --open – build the same reference locally.

License

MIT – see LICENSE.