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

About this binary crate: r3bl-cmdr

r3bl-cmdr is the second thing that's described above.

You can run it using cargo run.

This TUI (text user interface) app showcases the use of the r3bl_rs_utils crate. It contains quite a few sample apps which are meant to be relevant use cases that are relevant for developer workflows (who are remote, and work w/ teams).

Building & running locally

The Cargo.toml file contains a [dependencies] section which lists all the dependencies that this crate has, one of which is a path dependency on the r3bl_rs_utils crate. The creates.io version uses the r3bl_rs_utils crate from the crates.io repository, but your local copy will use the folder specified in the path.

We plan to remove the path dependency when this crate is ready to be used by end users. Currently it early WIP so it has this dependency for ease of development.

So, to build and run this locally, you have to clone the r3blrsutils repo so that it shares the same parent as this crate. Here's a sample folder structure.

text ├── github │   ├── r3bl-cmdr │ └── r3bl-rs-utils

Contributing

This binary crate is being developed as a set of examples. The actual product will emerge as these examples are evolved into features of the actual product, which is intended to be released to developers.

Please read our community contributing guidelines here.

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