tui-rs

tui-rs is a Rust library to build rich terminal user interfaces and dashboards. It is heavily inspired by the Javascript library blessed-contrib and the Go library termui.

The library itself supports two different backends to draw to the terminal. You can either choose from:

However, some features may only be available in one of the two.

The library is based on the principle of immediate rendering with intermediate buffers. This means that at each new frame you should build all widgets that are supposed to be part of the UI. While providing a great flexibility for rich and interactive UI, this may introduce overhead for highly dynamic content. So, the implementation try to minimize the number of ansi escapes sequences generated to draw the updated UI. In practice, given the speed of Rust the overhead rather comes from the terminal emulator than the library itself.

Moreover, the library does not provide any input handling nor any event system and you may rely on the previously cited libraries to achieve such features.

Get Started

Create the terminal interface

Every application using tui should start by instantiating a Terminal. It is a light abstraction over available backends that provides basic functionalities such as clearing the screen, hiding the cursor, etc. By default only the termion backend is available.

use tui::Terminal;
use tui::backend::TermionBackend;

fn main() {
  let backend = TermionBackend::new().unwrap();
  let mut terminal = Terminal::new(backend);
}

If for some reason, you might want to use the rustbox backend instead, you need the to replace your tui dependency specification by:

[dependencies.tui]
version = "0.1.3"
default-features = false
features = ['rustbox']

and then create the terminal in a similar way:

use tui::Terminal;
use tui::backend::RustboxBackend;

fn main() {
  let backend = RustboxBackend::new().unwrap();
  let mut terminal = Terminal::new(backend);
}

Layout

The library comes with a basic yet useful layout management object called Group. As you may see below and in the examples, the library makes heavy use of the builder pattern to provide full customization. And the Group object is no exception:

use tui::widgets::{Block, border};
use tui::layout::{Group, Rect, Direction};

fn draw(t: &mut Terminal<TermionBackend>) {

  let size = t.size().unwrap();

  Group::default()
    /// You first choose a main direction for the group
    .direction(Direction::Vertical)
    /// An optional margin
    .margin(1)
    /// The preferred sizes (heights in this case)
    .sizes(&[Size::Fixed(10), Size::Max(20), Size::Min(10)])
    /// The computed (or cached) layout is then available as the second argument
    /// of the closure
    .render(t, &size, |t, chunks| {
        /// Continue to describe your UI there.
        Block::default()
          .title("Block")
          .borders(border::ALL)
          .render(t, &chunks[0]);
    })

This let you describe responsive terminal UI by nesting groups. You should note that by default the computed layout tries to fill the available space completely. So if for any reason you might need a blank space somewhere, try to pass an additional size to the group and don't use the corresponding area inside the render method.

Once you have finished to describe the UI, you just need to call:

t.draw().unwrap()

to actually draw to the terminal.

Widgets

The library comes with the following list of widgets:

Click on each item to get an example.

Demo

The source code of the demo gif.

License

MIT

Author

Florian Dehau

tui 0.1.3