Crate r3bl_rs_utils_core
source ·Expand description
Context
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.
-
🔮 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 things like React, JSX, CSS, and Redux, but making everything async (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 CSS & JSX.
-
🌎 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 (that is in a Redux store). Each “app” may also have its own Redux store.
- Here are some examples of the types of “app“s we want to build:
- multi user text editors w/ syntax highlighting
- integrations w/ github issues
- integrations w/ calendar, email, contacts APIs
This crate provides lots of useful functionality to help you build TUI (text user interface) apps, along w/ general niceties & ergonomics that all Rustaceans 🦀 can enjoy 🎉:
- Thread-safe & fully asynchronous Redux crate (using Tokio to run subscribers and middleware in separate tasks). The reducer functions are run sequentially.
- Loosely coupled & fully asynchronous TUI framework to make it possible (and easy) to build sophisticated TUIs (Text User Interface apps) in Rust.
- Lots of declarative macros,
and procedural macros
(both function like and derive) to avoid having to write lots of boilerplate code for many
common (and complex) tasks. And even less noisy
Result
andError
types. - Non binary tree data structure inspired by memory arenas, that is thread safe and supports parallel tree walking.
- Utility functions to improve
ergonomics of commonly used patterns
in Rust programming, ranging from things like colorizing
stdout
,stderr
output to lazy value holders.
Learn more about how this library is built
🦜 Here are some articles (on developerlife.com) about how this crate is made:
- https://developerlife.com/2022/02/24/rust-non-binary-tree/
- https://developerlife.com/2022/03/12/rust-redux/
- https://developerlife.com/2022/03/30/rust-proc-macro/
🦀 You can also find all the Rust related content on developerlife.com here.
Other crates that depend on this crate
This crate is a dependency of the following crates:
r3bl_rs_utils_macro
(procedural macros)r3bl_rs_utils
Due to the requirements of proc macros being in a separate crate, this breakdown of one crate into multiple crates is necessary:
- Put some code in a separate crate (
r3bl_rs_utils_core
) that is used by other crates. - Put the proc macros in a separate crate (
r3bl_rs_utils_macro
). This crate also depends on ther3bl_rs_utils_core
crate. - Finally, make the “public” crate (
r3bl_rs_utils
) depend on the other two.
As a way to hide this kind of layering from the users of the “main” r3bl_rs_utils
crate, all
the modules tend to be re-exported, making them available from the “main” or top-level crate;
more info on this
here.
Re-exports
pub use async_safe_share_mutate::*;
pub use color_text::styles::*;
pub use color_text::*;
pub use common::*;
pub use decl_macros::*;
pub use tui_core::*;
pub use utils::*;
Modules
r3bl_rs_utils_core
crate are in support of the tui
module in the
“main” r3bl_rs_utils
crate.Macros
assert_eq!
but automatically prints the left and right hand side variables if the
assertion fails. Useful for debugging tests, since cargo would just print out the left and right
values w/out providing information on what variables were being compared.tokio::spawn
. This is useful for spawning a task that will run in the
background from a function that is NOT async.$option
, and if None
then run the $next
closure which must
return a value that is set to $option
. Basically a way to compute
something lazily when it (the Option
) is set to None
.$option
, and if None
then run the $next
closure which must
return an error. This macro must be called in a block that returns a
CommonResult<T>
.$code
block after evaluating the $eval
expression and assigning
it to $id
.with_mut!
except that it returns the value of the $code
block.