Rainfrog – a database management TUI for Postgres
(github.com)188 points by achristmascarl 3 days ago
188 points by achristmascarl 3 days ago
Not OP, but I personally put off using a UI for years before finally trying a few and eventually settling on Postico for Mac. I still jump to psql often, but for me it's an accumulation of small quality-of-life improvements:
- results are formatted nicely by default; no more doing a first query, getting too many columns so results wrap unreadably, then changing the columns for a second query, and so on
- manually editing rows is as easy as with a spreadsheet; of course hopefully you don't have to do this often...
- I can change common filters & sorts in the UI with a few clicks instead of having to change SQL; sure, the SQL would only require typing a few characters, but if it's 2 clicks vs. 8 characters, it's still a small win
Downsides are:
- the GUI has an interface for saving queries, but it refuses to let me save them to a subfolder of my project; it wants to save them all in some global location. This doesn't seem good for sharing queries
- if you are doing more complicated sorting or aggregation, it's still easier to just go to psql than to fiddle with the GUI
oh wow, if i had known about pspg beforehand i might not have made this, it looks great!
It’s a good idea! For some reason Postico’s built-in query viewer doesn’t seem to follow them, unfortunately.
a big one for me is being able to jump between/search for tables and preview their rows, columns, and indexes quickly; especially when there are many tables/schemas and i don't remember their names
another one is a more comfortable editing experience for queries
I didn’t learn this until recently but in psql you can use \e or \editor to open the current line in $EDITOR. It helps a lot.
thank you! support for other DBs is planned, starting with mysql and sqlite. no set timeline yet though
Nice! I see DBeaver and DataGrip implementing connection layer through JDBC.
Not sure if that would be a viable option in Rust.
Generally if you put a space before your command it'll bypass the history, though depending on your *nix you might need to set `HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth` in your bashrc or similar if it's not already.
Agree that it would be nice to specify credentials a different way - however as a workaround: some bash-based shells support prefixing the command with a space as a way of not saving that command into history.
Ref: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Vari...
I'm new to Rust, can someone tell me if that's good Rust code I could learn from?
https://github.com/achristmascarl/rainfrog/blob/main/src/app...
I only looked at the linked file, so I'm not going to speak to the rest of the code and don't really have a good grasp of the architecture here.
This seems mostly ok. The only thing that (imo) wouldn't pass code review is that big honking loop at https://github.com/achristmascarl/rainfrog/blob/main/src/app.... That thing needs to be refactored down to be readable, with individual logic chunks being put into their own functions and tidied up a bit.
That's not really Rust-specific, obviously, but all the `match` and `if let` and whatever other Rust stuff looks fine, so it's what I've got.
on a more serious note, the library i used for the query editor, tui-textarea [0], is very well done, and the other db tui i drew inspiration from, gobang[1], is a great example of a ratatui app. would recommend checking those out
Looks great! I'll be watching your progress with great interest.
What do you use for the DataTable widget? Is there a Rust/Ratatui equivalent of DataTable (https://textual.textualize.io/widgets/data_table/) used by Harlequin?
yep! ratatui has the Table widget: https://docs.rs/ratatui/latest/ratatui/widgets/struct.Table....
I really like this, and I think others will too. Please be judicious with feature requests - so far the simplicity and ease of use is what I like most about it!
Looks sleek! But I’m curious, what made you decide that gobang[0] wasn’t cutting it for you?
There are a bunch of these, like [1] and [2], probably a lot more.
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main reason was that it hadn't been updated in a while. i also wanted the query editor to be more flexible / not limited to just filtering
popups are windows. selecting+copying text from the results-table does not work the first time. clicking in the left pane on a connection sometimes picks the wrong one (really weird this one as it is not consistent). i only see the standard wayland icon (not the worst).
it does not unfortunately; open to suggestions about common slash commands ppl would like to see included as shortcuts!
Been seeing lots of cool TUIs built with ratatui. Can anyone offer a comparison between ratatui and Golang https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea?
I've been wanting to get into building a TUI but can't decide which library to pick.
I've been using both.
Charm/bubbletea toolstack, is very much focused on an ELM style architecture, I.e. message passing and deriving UI from state. You can still do immediate type UI if that is what you prefer, but it won't fit with any of the standard components. Bubbletea is a framework more or less, so even if you know Go, it will require you to learn how to build to its strengths.
Ratatui is by default not very opinionated about how to handle state and updates, which requires some development from you, or using a third party library to get an opinionated architecture around it. Ratatui is more of a collection of libraries, out of the box, it expects a certain interface for components, but it is up to you how you want to compose them together. Whether that is immediate-, stateful-, react-, or ELM style. Stateful is the default for all their examples.
Charms way of doing terminal UI is very much based around strings, which can sometimes give issues with spacing, as components can be fiddly to be constrained within a certain space.
Ratatui creates UI on top of a matrix of bytes, which makes it more difficult to do easy things, but allows you to more easily build complex uis.
Generally I prefer Ratatui, as you can really build robust and fast uis on top of it. It does take a bit more work to get started though. I am also biased by Rust tho.
Ratatui maintainer here. I'd agree with all of the above points.
The lack of opinionated approach stems from Ratatui being not a framework, but a library (you call us, we don't call you), and not having any of the event/input handling things included.
There's likely room for a framework or two on top of it.
I second this, could some also add C#'s "Spectre.Console" https://github.com/spectreconsole/spectre.console
I found it but great in handling interactivity compared to https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui
What would you say are the key benefits of using this over psql? Is it mainly table metadata and properties?
Asking because running queries, history, formatting of results etc. can be achieved by configuring psqlrc.