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.
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
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.