MinUI 🌒

MinUI is a minimal terminal-based game and UI engine written in Rust. This project is a work in progress, currently in its very early stages!

Motivation

MinUI was born from a desire to create terminal-based games in Rust, specifically a terminal Tetris clone in my case. While several terminal UI libraries/frameworks exist for Rust, none quite offered the perfect balance of simplicity, performance, and game-focused features that I was looking for. MinUI aims to fill this gap by providing a fast, easy-to-use framework that makes terminal game and UI development a joy.

Planned Features

• 🚀 Fast: Built for performance with gaming in mind
• 🎮 Game-focused, TUI-ready: API designed around common game development needs
• 🎯 Minimalist: Clean, intuitive API with zero unnecessary complexity
• ⌨️ Input Handling: Robust keyboard event system
• 🧰 Safe: Proper error handling and automatic resource cleanup

Project Status

MinUI is in early development, and I'm actively working on adding more features:

• Full color support
• Simple and customizable widget system
  • Container widget
  • Label widget
  • Text block widget
  • Panel widget
  • Table widget
  • Input widget
  • Predefined common widget layouts
• Robust error handling
• Buffered drawing for smooth and efficient updates
• Built-in game loop utilities
• Simplified character/sprite and map management utilities
• Easy character/sprite movement support with common Unicode characters built-in
• Cell management with collision detection options
• Support for various input methods (customizable key binds with crokey, mouse support, etc.)

Getting Started

Simply add the MinUI crate to your cargo.toml as follows:

[dependencies]
minui = "0.1.4"

Then you can get started using one of the simple, provided example programs.

Basic Example

use minui::{Window, Event, TerminalWindow};

// This example shows the minimal workflow, how to:
//  - Create a window
//  - Write some text
//  - Enter an input loop
//  - Handle different types of input events
//  - Clean up automatically when done

fn main() -> minui::Result<()> {
    let mut window = TerminalWindow::new()?;
    window.clear()?;

    window.write_str(0, 0, "Press 'q' to quit")?;

    loop {
        match window.get_input()? {
            Event::Character('q') => break,
            Event::Character(c) => {
                window.write_str(1, 0, &format!("You pressed: {}", c))?;
            }
            evt => {
                window.write_str(1, 0, &format!("Event: {:?}", evt))?;
            }
        }
    }

    Ok(())
}

Run the example program with the command: cargo run --example basic_usage

Building Terminal Games with MinUI

MinUI is designed to make terminal game development straightforward. Here's what makes it great for games:

• Minimal Dependencies: Built on crossterm with minimal additional dependencies
• Game First: Designed primarily for terminal-based game development, with great UI capabilities as well
• Easy to Learn: Clean, intuitive API that gets out of your way
• Performance Focused: Built with game performance requirements in mind

Building TUI Apps with MinUI

MinUI also has a focus on simplifying the task of building TUI applications. Here's some of what it has to offer:

• Simple Widget System: Easy-to-use widgets with all the features you need and nothing you don't
• Example Programs: Several examples to help you get started with the widgets
• Customizable: I'm trying to make every widget I add as configurable as possible, while not overwhelming you with options

Games Built with MinUI

• Coming Soon: Tet.rs

Acknowledgments

Built using:

• crossterm - Cross-platform terminal manipulation library
• thiserror - Error handling
• crokey - Easy keybind configuration