Ratatui Labs

Experimental Ratatui work lives here before it is ready to move into a focused crate or the main Ratatui repository.

Initial crate placeholders follow the same shape as Ratatui namespace reservation crates. They can grow into real experiments when there is a concrete design to test.

Crates

• crates/ratatui-action - experimental semantic action identifiers, metadata, inputs, and invocation requests.
• crates/ratatui-command-palette - experimental command palette state, rendering, preview, and invocation behavior.
• crates/ratatui-derive - experimental derive macros and code generation helpers for Ratatui APIs.
• crates/ratatui-layout - experimental frame-local UI coordination primitives for visible regions, focus targets, pointer targets, cursor requests, and scroll metadata.
• crates/ratatui-textwrap - experimental materialization of wrapped, styled Ratatui text.
• crates/ratatui-labs - umbrella crate for labs-style experiments and prototype Ratatui work.

Text wrapping

ratatui-textwrap precomputes styled Text at a requested terminal width. It compares textwrap's first-fit and optimal-fit algorithms with an explicit Paragraph-compatible legacy algorithm; the same algorithms are also available at the Line level for custom widgets. The crate README is the canonical usage guide.

Examples

cargo run -p ratatui-command-palette --example command-palette
cargo run -p ratatui-command-palette --example command-palette -- --help
cargo run -p ratatui-command-palette --example command-palette -- --renderer split
cargo run -p ratatui-layout --example left_right_row
cargo run -p ratatui-layout --example frame_snapshot

Docs

• Command palette PRD
• Architecture decision records

Validation

cargo +nightly fmt --all
cargo check --workspace --all-targets
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace

The repository also provides matching just recipes:

just validate

For experiments that change visible terminal behavior, use Betamax for rendered validation:

just betamax
just betamax tapes/command-palette.tape

The default recipe runs every tape under tapes/. Pass a tape path to run one scenario. Betamax tapes should render the real TUI flow and write PNG, GIF, and state artifacts under target/betamax/ for local inspection. Set BETAMAX_JOBS to control default parallelism.