R3BL TUI library & apps focused on developer productivity

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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. And we are looking for contributors & feedback on the code :crab:.

:crystal_ball: First, 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.

  1. Taking things like React, JSX, CSS, and Redux, but making everything async (they can be run in parallel & concurrent via Tokio).
  2. Even the thread running the main event loop doesn’t block since it is async.
  3. Using proc macros to create DSLs to implement CSS & JSX.

:rocket: You can start using this library to build TUI apps today - r3bl_rs_utils crate

:earth_americas: Second, we want to build apps to enhance developer productivity & workflows.

  1. 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.
  2. 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

Here’s what we have built so far:

  1. r3bl_rs_utils (library): https://crates.io/crates/r3bl_rs_utils/#tui
  2. r3bl-cmdr (app suite): https://crates.io/crates/r3bl-cmdr
  3. Documentation: Rust | developerlife.com

:pray: If you are interested in contributing please reply to this message or DM me

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