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Show HN: RatatuiRuby wraps Rust Ratatui as a RubyGem – TUIs with the joy of Ruby
by Kerrick
Excited to try it out as well. I often need to build simple CLI based apps in ruby so often would reach for TTY Toolkit: https://ttytoolkit.org/
However, I feel like it's in maintenance mode at this point, so glad to see some new options available.
Shouldn't some software be allowed to be done? Maintenance mode on a TUI library seems a reasonable place to be.
Sure. I was probably trying to be too polite and didn't want to use the word "abandoned", but that's probably a better term for the library at this point. There's a good amount of open issues and PRs in many of the component gems that haven't been addressed in years and requests to help maintain it have gone unanswered[0].
sure it’s a good TUI library, but is it agentic?
It looks great overall, but the example browser is something really special! Never seen such detailed walkthroughs before.
Thank you very much. I am not proud of the AI slop code [0] it took to get RDoc to generate the HTML for those pages, but I am proud of the result!
[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/stable/item/tas...
[1]: https://www.ratatui-ruby.dev/docs/v1.0/examples/app_color_pi...
Landing page is great: informative, visual example, clear code example. Love it
Thank you! I wrote the code snippets and picked the color palette, but the web design came by way of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46587284
And my wife, wonderful as always, helped critique the writing! My RadioMenu class's comments (in the "See More: Inline menu example" expando-section) were far worse before she helped.
Living the 80s, I guess the current nostalgia wave across tapes, portable CD players, Vynil and co, also applies to computer interfaces.
That's gotta be part of it. But I think another important part is how TUIs have important restrictions that lead to surprisingly delightful applications despite their downsides:
- You don't have control over font size and your color palette can be limited (and chosen by the user in their Terminal settings), so it's hard to go too off-the-rails in aesthetic design
- You work on a strict character grid, so it's hard to get things like padding, margin, and leading wrong.
- You can't assume the use of a mouse, so everything has to work on keyboard shortcuts. This usually leads to extremely power-user-friendly tools. Plus, keyboard-driven, power-user-friendly UIs are hot right now, even on the web (Linear, Fernand, etc.).
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Is there any evidence that Rust proponents did it, or are people assuming that because Rene has been critical of Rust? That would be horrible if true, but I'd rather not jump to conclusions that fast.
How significant are AI contributions to this project?
Very significant. Nearly every commit has involved the use of one or more LLMs, as evidenced by the commit trailers. I would not have started this project without it, because I do not know Rust. Even the overall direction and architecture has involved roleplay-based "rubber ducking" with LLMs [0].
I've carefully stewarded & heavily edited the Ruby code in lib/ and test/, and the documentation (RDoc and Markdown). The Rust code has been left largely to the AI, with its quality kept presumably-okay by Clippy and extensive automated tests on the Ruby side.
As for the non-library stuff ("internal" to the project), you can tell by browsing the tasks/ folder where I left the AI to its own devices [0], and where I heavily edited the Ruby code [1].
[0]: https://man.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/history/ecosystem-dr...
[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/783a08eabe2307f...
[2]: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/783a08eabe2307f...
Great job :-)
I just made a new installer for Discourse on CharmRuby, now I gotta check this out and see if porting is feasible. Hopefully this reduces the app size, that is quite large with CharmRuby
Looks exciting!
Does it have proper support for opening an external editor (via $EDITOR like nano, vim, etc?)? I ran into issues with that in Ink and had to switch over to Bubbletea, but I'd love to use Ruby instead of Go
I know nothing about this, but bubbletea-ruby was in the news recently
Thank you for enabling my Ruby addiction. This looks amazing. Great work!
Every person I can enable to write Ruby instead of Go is a win in my book. :-)
Looks really interesting, I’m excited to explore this.
super cool, great work Kerrick!
Thank you! My first Show HN in 2012 [0] was an inline TUI (of sorts) written in Ruby [1], so this is a great day.
Looking forward to experimenting with it. Looks awesome!
Fantastic, this looks excellent and excited to try it
Love it
I can't like this enough, Ruby is perfect language for TUI apps and emergence of TUI apps is really welcome change.
This is awesome, will definitely take this for a spin!
Thank you! Please let me know how you find it. I want to make sure the DX is as good as possible.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code