Struggling with Ratatui as a Beginner Is it just me?

help
1

Hi everyone, I'm currently learning Rust (I've mentioned the details before) and I'm halfway through 'the book'. During this journey, I decided to build a to-do app. Doing this in standard Rust without external libraries was quite simple, but I wanted to take it a step further by using Ratatui.

However, I struggled significantly with it, particularly with I/O operations and handling input/mouse events. This discouraged me and made me feel as if I didn't know Rust at all. I understand the concepts, but it seems like a library with very low abstraction, and the widget class feels a bit primitive to me. Additionally, I've never used a TUI library before.

Is it just me who feels this way, or do other beginners agree? Is there a TUI library available that is more beginner-friendly for a new Rust developer than Ratatui?

2

Ratatui is a powerful but relatively low-level crate primarily focused on painting widgets to the screen. Even input handling is punted to an even lower-level crate like Crossterm.

The closest alternative I can think of is Cursive, which integrates event/focus handling and feels a bit more higher-level - which might be more beginner-friendly. But it's also maintained more sporadically.