Wasm support

[Jak2k]

Problem

My tui needs to be accessible in the browser.

Solution

wasm

Alternatives

Using a GUI.

Additional context

[joshka]

@aschey has done a PoC for this at https://github.com/aschey/ratatui-wasm
They mentioned it in https://discord.com/channels/1070692720437383208/1072906183104528434/1156033015202451547
There are a few other mentions of WASM in the discord that might worth looking into to find out if other people have done anything

[InDieTasten]

I think having this feature would be great for being able to demo a lot of TUI projects. I would definitely love to be able to showcase my TUI apps inside xterm.js.

The examples from raratui itself could also be showcased in the browser.

[gold-silver-copper]

bevy_ratatui allows you to compile to wasm

https://github.com/gold-silver-copper/bevy_ratatui

[InDieTasten]

Interesting. Would you care to explain how it works? Is there a way to run stdin to it and have full terminal emulation with mouse support and so on?

[gold-silver-copper]

bevy is a game engine which provides input and window handling, as well as some UI primitives

bevy_ratatui works by creating a faux terminal out of the UI primitives, and then drawing to this terminal through ratatui.

Mouse suport is possible but not automatic yet. Currently you cannot use it with xterm.js , it simply makes its own render , but perhaps that will be possible in a future update when I decouple the bevy renderer from the logic loop.
You can see an example of it running in WASM here: https://gold-silver-copper.github.io/
repository: https://github.com/gold-silver-copper/gold-silver-copper.github.io/tree/main

I will be working on more examples and features coming soon !

[jrvidal]

In a bit of convergent evolution, I ended up re-creating most of @aschey's PoC for a TUI app of mine: https://_rvidal.gitlab.io/pneo/

It also requires a fork of crossterm, though the changes are quite minimal (plus a small reimplementation of EventStream).

[joshka]

Cool stuff!

[orhun]

Very nice, I'm curious about why a fork of crossterm is needed. Asking this question for people who might stumble upon the same challenges in the future :)

[jrvidal]

The changes pretty much speak for themselves. But in a nutshell:

• crossterm does not compile in wasm32-unknown-unknown right out of the bat, so a bunch of unimplemented!() placeholders are needed.
• EventStream is not usable as is, b/c it relies on threads and the UNIX machinery for TTYs. But part of the implementation is very much reusable: the parsing logic for data coming out of "stdin". So I simply exposed that.