Crate r3bl_rs_utils_macro

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.

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 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.

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 (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:
     1. multi user text editors w/ syntax highlighting
     2. integrations w/ github issues
     3. 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 🎉:

1. 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.
2. Thread-safe & fully asynchronous Redux crate (using Tokio to run subscribers and middleware in separate tasks). The reducer functions are run sequentially.
3. 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 and Error types.
4. Non binary tree data structure inspired by memory arenas, that is thread safe and supports parallel tree walking.
5. 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:

1. https://developerlife.com/2022/02/24/rust-non-binary-tree/
2. https://developerlife.com/2022/03/12/rust-redux/
3. 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 r3bl_rs_utils crate.
• Here’s a guide to writing procedural macros on developerlife.com.

Macros

• make_safe_async_fn_wrapperDeprecated
• make_shareable_fn_wrapperDeprecated
• make_struct_safe_to_share_and_mutate
• tui_style
  Creates a new Style declaratively. If id isn’t supplied, then u8::MAX is used. This represents the “style does not have an assigned id” case. Computed styles don’t have an id and are set to u8::MAX as well.

Derive Macros

• Builder