r3bl_macro

Why R3BL?

R3BL TUI library & suite of apps focused on developer productivity

We are working on building command line apps in Rust which have rich text user interfaces (TUI). We want to lean into the terminal as a place of productivity, and build all kinds of awesome apps for it.

1. 🔮 Instead of just building one app, we are building a library to enable any kind of rich TUI development w/ a twist: taking concepts that work really well for the frontend mobile and web development world and re-imagining them for TUI & Rust.

   • Taking inspiration from things like React, SolidJS, Elm, iced-rs, Jetpack Compose, JSX, CSS, but making everything async (so they can be run in parallel & concurrent via Tokio).
   • Even the thread running the main event loop doesn't block since it is async.
   • Using proc macros to create DSLs to implement something inspired by CSS & JSX.

2. 🌎 We are building apps to enhance developer productivity & workflows.

   • The idea here is not to rebuild tmux in Rust (separate processes mux'd onto a single terminal window). Rather it is to build a set of integrated "apps" (or "tasks") that run in the same process that renders to one terminal window.
   • Inside of this terminal window, we can implement things like "app" switching, routing, tiling layout, stacking layout, etc. so that we can manage a lot of TUI apps (which are tightly integrated) that are running in the same process, in the same window. So you can imagine that all these "app"s have shared application state. Each "app" may also have its own local application state.
   • Here are some examples of the types of "app"s we plan to build (for which this infrastructure acts as the open source engine):
     1. Multi user text editors w/ syntax highlighting.
     2. Integrations w/ github issues.
     3. Integrations w/ calendar, email, contacts APIs.

All the crates in the r3bl-open-core repo provide lots of useful functionality to help you build TUI (text user interface) apps, along w/ general niceties & ergonomics that all Rustaceans 🦀 can enjoy 🎉.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Changelog
• Learn how these crates are built, provide feedback

Introduction

This crate is necessary since Rust requires procedural macros to be in their own crate, and this crate provides all the procedural macros for the r3bl-open-core mono repo, most notably tui_style!.

Due to the requirements of proc macros being in a separate crate, this breakdown of one crate into multiple crates is necessary.

Here are some other crates for which this crate is a dependency (run rg "r3bl_macro" -g "Cargo.toml" to get a list):

1. r3bl_tui crate.
2. r3bl-cmdr crate.

Here's a guide to writing procedural macros on developerlife.com.

Changelog

Please check out the changelog to see how the library has evolved over time.

Learn how these crates are built, provide feedback

To learn how we built this crate, please take a look at the following resources.

• If you like consuming video content, here's our YT channel. Please consider subscribing.
• If you like consuming written content, here's our developer site. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter.
• If you have questions, please join our discord server.

License: Apache-2.0