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
These crates provides lots of useful functionality to help you build TUI (text user interface) apps, along w/ general niceties & ergonomics that all Rustaceans 🦀 can enjoy 🎉:
- Loosely coupled & fully asynchronous TUI framework to make it possible (and easy) to build sophisticated TUIs (Text User Interface apps) in Rust that are inspired by React, Redux, CSS and Flexbox.
- Thread-safe & fully asynchronous Redux crate (using Tokio to run subscribers and middleware in separate tasks). The reducer functions are run sequentially.
- 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_tui
r3bl_redux
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::color_text_default_styles::*;
pub use color_text::*;
pub use common::*;
pub use decl_macros::*;
pub use tui_core::*;
pub use utils::*;
Modules
- ANSI colorized text https://github.com/ogham/rust-ansi-term helper methods.
- All the modules in the
r3bl_rs_utils_core
crate are in support of thetui
module in the “main”r3bl_rs_utils
crate.
Macros
- Safely adds two unsigned numbers and returns the result. Does not panic.
- A wrapper for
pretty_assertions::assert_eq!
macro. - Similar to
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. - Syntactic sugar to run a conditional statement. Here’s an example.
- Creates a new ChUnit amount.
- This is a really simple macro to make it effortless to use the color console logger. It takes a single identifier as an argument, or any number of them. It simply dumps an arrow symbol, followed by the identifier (stringify’d) along with the value that it contains (using the Debug formatter). All of the output is colorized for easy readability. You can use it like this.
- Safely decrements an unsigned number. Does not panic.
- Declarative macro to surround the given block with a call to
tokio::spawn
. This is useful for spawning a task that will run in the background from a function that is NOT async. - Safely increments an unsigned number. Does not panic.
- Example:
- Macro to make building Stylesheet easy. This returns a CommonResult because it checks to see that all Styles that are added have an
id
. If they don’t, then an a CommonError is thrown. This is to ensure that valid styles are added to a stylesheet. Without anid
, they can’t be retrieved after they’re added here, rendering them useless. - Safely subtracts two unsigned numbers and returns the result. Does not panic.
- Wrap the given block or stmt so that it returns a Result<()>. It is just syntactic sugar that helps having to write Ok(()) repeatedly.
- Wrap the given block or stmt so that it returns a Result<$it>. It is just syntactic sugar that helps having to write Ok($it) repeatedly.
- Unwrap the
$option
, and ifNone
then run the$next
closure which must return a value that is set to$option
. Basically a way to compute something lazily when it (theOption
) is set toNone
. - Unwrap the
$option
, and ifNone
then run the$next
closure which must return an error. This macro must be called in a block that returns aCommonResult<T>
. - Runs the
$code
block after evaluating the$eval
expression and assigning it to$id
. - Similar to
with_mut!
except that it returns the value of the$code
block.