24 days of Rust - Cursive

Day 14 - cursive

My first programming IDE back in the 90s was Borland Turbo Pascal. Since the PC that I used at that time was running MS-DOS, it meant no graphical interface. I was so surprised when I ran turbo.exe for the first time and saw complex menus, dialog windows and an editor with code highlighting.

But the world of TUI (text-based user interfaces) doesn't mean only IDEs. Midnight Commander is a very popular and feature-rich file browser. There are even text-based web browsers, such as Lynx or ELinks.

TUI applications tend to use ncurses as the abstraction layer over different terminals. While there are Rust bindings to ncurses, there's another cool library built on top of them. Cursive provides high-level building blocks such as views, menus and layers. It also works on Windows, when built with features = ["pancurses"].

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Written on Dec. 14, 2016