Crate r3bl_cmdr

Why R3BL?

R3BL TUI library & suite of apps focused on developer productivity

We are working on building command line apps in Rust which have rich text user interfaces (TUI). We want to lean into the terminal as a place of productivity, and build all kinds of awesome apps for it.

1. 🔮 Instead of just building one app, we are building a library to enable any kind of rich TUI development w/ a twist: taking concepts that work really well for the frontend mobile and web development world and re-imagining them for TUI & Rust.

   • Taking inspiration from things like React, SolidJS, Elm, iced-rs, Jetpack Compose, JSX, CSS, but making everything async (so they can be run in parallel & concurrent via Tokio).
   • Even the thread running the main event loop doesn’t block since it is async.
   • Using proc macros to create DSLs to implement something inspired by CSS & JSX.

2. 🌎 We are building apps to enhance developer productivity & workflows.

   • The idea here is not to rebuild tmux in Rust (separate processes mux’d onto a single terminal window). Rather it is to build a set of integrated “apps” (or “tasks”) that run in the same process that renders to one terminal window.
   • Inside of this terminal window, we can implement things like “app” switching, routing, tiling layout, stacking layout, etc. so that we can manage a lot of TUI apps (which are tightly integrated) that are running in the same process, in the same window. So you can imagine that all these “app“s have shared application state. Each “app” may also have its own local application state.
   • Here are some examples of the types of “app“s we plan to build (for which this infrastructure acts as the open source engine):
     1. Multi user text editors w/ syntax highlighting.
     2. Integrations w/ github issues.
     3. Integrations w/ calendar, email, contacts APIs.

All the crates in the r3bl-open-core repo provide lots of useful functionality to help you build TUI (text user interface) apps, along w/ general niceties & ergonomics that all Rustaceans 🦀 can enjoy 🎉.

Table of contents

• Installation
• Changelog
• Learn how these crates are built, provide feedback
• Run giti binary target
• Run edi binary target
• Build, run, test tasks
  • Prerequisites
  • Nushell scripts to build, run, test etc.

Installation

The two apps, edi and giti, that comprise r3bl-cmdr will put a smile on your face and make you more productive. These apps are currently available as early access preview 🐣.

• 😺 giti - an interactive git CLI app designed to give you more confidence and a better experience when working with git.
• 🦜 edi - a TUI Markdown editor that lets you edit Markdown files in your terminal in style.

To install r3bl-cmdr on your system, run the following command, assuming you have cargo on your system:

cargo install r3bl-cmdr

If you don’t have cargo on your system, you can either:

1. Follow these instructions to install cargo on your system first. Then run cargo install r3bl-cmdr to install this crate.
2. Build the binaries from the crate’s source code. First clone this repo. Then, run cd r3bl-open-core/cmdr && cargo install.

Changelog

Please check out the changelog to see how the library has evolved over time.

Learn how these crates are built, provide feedback

To learn how we built this crate, please take a look at the following resources.

• If you like consuming video content, here’s our YT channel. Please consider subscribing.
• If you like consuming written content, here’s our developer site. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter.
• If you have questions, please join our discord server.

Run giti binary target

To run from binary:

• Run cargo install r3bl-cmdr (detailed instructions above). This will install giti locally to ~/.cargo/bin.
• Run giti from anywhere on your system.
• Try giti --help to see the available commands.
• To delete one or more branches in your repo run giti branch delete.
• To checkout a branch run giti branch checkout.
• To create a new branch run giti branch new.

To run from source:

• Clone the r3bl-open-core repo.
• Go to the cmdr folder in your terminal.
• Run nu run install to install giti locally to ~/.cargo/bin.
• Run giti from anywhere on your system.
• Try giti --help to see the available commands.
• To delete one or more branches in your repo run giti branch delete.
• To checkout a branch run giti branch checkout.
• To create a new branch run giti branch new.
• If you want to generate log output for giti, run giti -l. For example, giti -l branch delete. To view this log output run nu run log.

Run edi binary target

To run from binary:

• Run cargo install r3bl-cmdr (detailed instructions above). This will install giti locally to ~/.cargo/bin.
• Run edi from anywhere on your system.
• Try edi --help to see the available commands.
• To open an existing file, run edi <file_name>. For example, edi README.md.

To run from source:

• Clone the r3bl-open-core repo.
• Go to the cmdr folder in your terminal.
• Run nu run install to install edi locally to ~/.cargo/bin.
• Run edi from anywhere on your system.
• Try edi --help to see the available commands.
• To open an existing file, run edi <file_name>. For example, edi README.md.
• If you want to generate log output for edi, run edi -l. For example, edi -l README.md. To view this log output run nu run log.

Build, run, test tasks

Prerequisites

🌠 In order for these to work you have to install the Rust toolchain, nu, cargo-watch, bat, and flamegraph on your system. Here are the instructions:

1. Install the Rust toolchain using rustup by following the instructions here.
2. Install cargo-watch using cargo install cargo-watch.
3. Install flamegraph using cargo install flamegraph.
4. Install bat using cargo install bat.
5. Install nu shell on your system using cargo install nu. It is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Nushell scripts to build, run, test etc.

Command	Description
nu run help	See all the commands you can pass to the run script
nu run install	Install giti, edi, rc to ~/.cargo/bin
nu run build	Build
nu run clean	Clean
nu run test	Run tests
nu run clippy	Run clippy
nu run log	View the log output. This video has a walkthrough of how to use this.
nu run docs	Build docs
nu run serve-docs	Serve docs over VSCode Remote SSH session
nu run rustfmt	Run rustfmt

The following commands will watch for changes in the source folder and re-run:

Command	Description
nu run watch-all-tests	Watch all test
nu run watch-one-test <test_name>	Watch one test
nu run watch-clippy	Watch clippy
nu run watch-macro-expansion-one-test <test_name>	Watch macro expansion for one test

There’s also a run script at the top level folder of the repo. It is intended to be used in a CI/CD environment w/ all the required arguments supplied or in interactive mode, where the user will be prompted for input.

Command	Description
nu run all	Run all the tests, linting, formatting, etc. in one go. Used in CI/CD
nu run build-full	This will build all the crates in the Rust workspace. And it will install all the required pre-requisite tools needed to work with this crate (what install-cargo-tools does) and clear the cargo cache, cleaning, and then do a really clean build.
nu run install-cargo-tools	This will install all the required pre-requisite tools needed to work with this crate (things like cargo-deny, flamegraph will all be installed in one go)
nu run check-licenses	Use cargo-deny to audit all licenses used in the Rust workspace

Re-exports

• pub use analytics_client::*;

Modules

• analytics_client
• color_constants
• edi
• giti
• rc

Constants

• DEBUG_ANALYTICS_CLIENT_MOD
• DEVELOPMENT_MODE