I love this work and everything else Ratatui does but I have to ask: if you're changing the terminal protocol and the terminal itself to do this, why not do something more ambitious; a full monospaced information-dense UI framework, a terminal designed for user interfaces, rather than one designed to replicate the limitations of dumb terminals?
I actually am exploring exactly this. Ironically from the perspective of someone that was trying to leave the Terminal.
How i got here i find kinda interesting. Originally i was trying to leave the terminal. Using GPUI/etc frameworks. I kept running into the terminal though, because no matter how nice the UI is - the terminal still needs to work excellently.
Eventually i decided to try an abomination. To use a custom terminal which, not unlike Kitty images, allows generic apps to pass escape codes to control the UI components. Where the UI components have no restriction on "dumb terminals". So my text editor is a two part app, an editor and a tty to render the actual custom UI APC codes.
This paved the way for true smooth scrolling from within a terminal editor, as the editor effectively paginates but the tty scrolls within the buffered pages. It allows for different UI components to mix fonts and font sizes, eg popup docs being a different size than the other text, and .. well, anything i suppose.
I have to say it's working excellently and is slowly becoming my daily driver. I won't link it though, it's a fully vibe coded and even claude designed horror.
I'm surprised i've not seen more of this in the past to be honest.
Text terminal with every keystroke round-tripped through the server is not a design that makes sense for any reason other than backwards compatibility. It's kind of annoying to design for and atrocious for performance.
A much better alternative to this would be to for more terminal emulators to implement overstrike mode (DECSET 20, as available on the VK100). That way you could just draw border characters over existing text cells to achieve the same thing.
Unfortunately mintty is the only terminal emulator I'm aware of which supports overstrike [0], as this would open up a world of new possibilities for TUI apps if more widely supported.
I’m not against overstrike, but I can think of one drawback of that solution: it becomes significantly harder to have rounded corners with a filled interior.
But I’m not trying to argue for nor against either solution.
I appreciate the innovation happening with TUIs in these modern times. But, aesthetically, I have to say, I like my borders to have some breathing room, which gets lost in this particular treatment.
Why wouldn’t this work over tmux? The authors claims don’t make a whole lot of sense because if this were a cell property, like any other CSI, then it’ll get rendered in the terminal emulator exactly as intended. And we know this because none of the other CSI sequences get garbled over multiplextors.
But for there to be a dedicated section on how multiplexors wouldn’t work suggests to me that the authors already tried this via tmux.
So I’m left wondering what they’ve done with the implementation of this to make that a problem.
I spotted they are using DCS sequences. But even that shouldn’t be an issue itself.
UI in a browser is a massive hack in itself, a clean design would be better. For example a compact semantic remote access protocol to use with UIs, something like SPICE but better optimized for networks, fully presentation-independent, and less janky. This would let everyone use a GUI framework of their choice with an adapter. But people building terminal GUIs are culturally not ready for this, they'd rather continue reinventing the wheel and piling up hacks in terminals. I wonder when they realize that proportional fonts are more readable when vertical alignment is handled separtely, and introduce terminals with variable-width fonts. And the presentation layer (I suggest calling it CSS).
Afraid that’s a contradiction. In this role, HTML is a pile of hacks upon hacks that was not originally intended for UIs.
But, yeah, people are trying to reinvent GUIs. By layering hacks over TTYs. If only there’d be some protocol for widgets and events over a stream connection…
the thing with X and wayland etc is, that they are low level. which is fine if you want full control over the presentation. what HTML was trying to do is to go higher level, send over some data and let the browser figure out how to present it. but it went wrong and people are abusing it as a low level presentation interface like X or wayland.
what we are missing is a really high level protocol/system that takes really high level data and figures out the presentation on its own.
take a list of files for example. you can run ls -l in a terminal and it will attempt a crude text based formatting of the output. or you can run a full gui filemanager.
what if there was a command that would produce ls output as a table data structure, run in a sort of terminal that knows how to format a table nicely without the ls command having to include any formatting instructions? this terminal would have support for all sorts of data types and structures to display all of them nicely.
> what if there was a command that would produce ls output as a table data structure, run in a sort of terminal that knows how to format a table nicely without the ls command having to include any formatting instructions? this terminal would have support for all sorts of data types and structures to display all of them nicely.
So, powershell? For some reason only Microsoft 365 IT jockeys really know it.
How i got here i find kinda interesting. Originally i was trying to leave the terminal. Using GPUI/etc frameworks. I kept running into the terminal though, because no matter how nice the UI is - the terminal still needs to work excellently.
Eventually i decided to try an abomination. To use a custom terminal which, not unlike Kitty images, allows generic apps to pass escape codes to control the UI components. Where the UI components have no restriction on "dumb terminals". So my text editor is a two part app, an editor and a tty to render the actual custom UI APC codes.
This paved the way for true smooth scrolling from within a terminal editor, as the editor effectively paginates but the tty scrolls within the buffered pages. It allows for different UI components to mix fonts and font sizes, eg popup docs being a different size than the other text, and .. well, anything i suppose.
I have to say it's working excellently and is slowly becoming my daily driver. I won't link it though, it's a fully vibe coded and even claude designed horror.
I'm surprised i've not seen more of this in the past to be honest.
Unfortunately mintty is the only terminal emulator I'm aware of which supports overstrike [0], as this would open up a world of new possibilities for TUI apps if more widely supported.
[0] https://github.com/mintty/mintty/wiki/CtrlSeqs#overstrike
But I’m not trying to argue for nor against either solution.
But for there to be a dedicated section on how multiplexors wouldn’t work suggests to me that the authors already tried this via tmux.
So I’m left wondering what they’ve done with the implementation of this to make that a problem.
I spotted they are using DCS sequences. But even that shouldn’t be an issue itself.
In fact it just makes it less secure.
> instead of hacks on top of hacks
Afraid that’s a contradiction. In this role, HTML is a pile of hacks upon hacks that was not originally intended for UIs.
But, yeah, people are trying to reinvent GUIs. By layering hacks over TTYs. If only there’d be some protocol for widgets and events over a stream connection…
what we are missing is a really high level protocol/system that takes really high level data and figures out the presentation on its own.
take a list of files for example. you can run ls -l in a terminal and it will attempt a crude text based formatting of the output. or you can run a full gui filemanager.
what if there was a command that would produce ls output as a table data structure, run in a sort of terminal that knows how to format a table nicely without the ls command having to include any formatting instructions? this terminal would have support for all sorts of data types and structures to display all of them nicely.
So, powershell? For some reason only Microsoft 365 IT jockeys really know it.