TeaTui

Tea = The Elm Architecture

This is an experimental project that aims to build an Elm-like framework for TUI development in Rust on top of Ratatui.

My main motivation to build this was to understand if I could structure a Ratatui application in an Elm-like fashion.

The provided templates from the Ratatui official sources write code in a very procedural way, abusing of mutability a bit too much for my taste. (That is, using &mut all over the place in function arguments).

I want to minimize the usage of mutability and build the most pure functional TUI apps that I can.

I feel that Elm has always been a great example to follow when it comes to building frontend in a pure-functional style, and so I will try to reproduce it in here.

How does it work

The state of your application is represented by a single type called the Model.

The Model will be used by a view process to render a View.

A separate process will read events from the outside world and send them to an update process.

The update process will take the model and an event and return a new model, potentially also returning a side effect.

The updated model will be sent to the view, triggering a new render based on the new state of the application.

If any side effects are returned from update, they will be processed in a separate process.

If the process responsible for handling side effects wants to update the state of the application, it will send a message to the update process.

The users of this framework only need to provide:

• An update function that given a model and a message return an Update instance.

• A view function that given a reference to the model, returns a View

• An effects function that given a reference to the model and an effect, might perform any side effects and optionally return a message to update the state of the application

Examples

You can find a folder with example projects in the examples folder.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license (LICENSE or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)