soft_ratatui

Software rendering backend for ratatui. No GPU required. TUI everywhere.

rotating_terminal shows soft_ratatui driving a 3D terminal screen in Bevy.

Fast, portable, no-bloat.

• Optimized for speed, generally faster than running ratatui inside a terminal with crossterm. 120+ fps on normal workloads.
• Choose your own rendering backend: embedded-graphics, embedded-ttf, cosmic-text, bdf-parser
• Custom portable pixel rasterizer, outputs RGB/RGBA pixmaps, color-to-alpha support

Feature Flags

soft_ratatui is highly modular. Enable only the backends and features you need to reduce binary size and dependencies.

Feature	Enables	Description
unicodefonts	[embedded_graphics_unicodefonts]	Embedded-graphics fonts with Unicode support. Automatically enables embedded-graphics. Enabled by default.
embedded-graphics	[EmbeddedGraphics]	Uses embedded-graphics font atlases for TUI rendering.
bdf-parser	[Bdf]	Bitmap Distribution Format font support.
embedded-ttf	[EmbeddedTTF]	TrueType font rendering via RustType. Automatically enables embedded-graphics.
cosmic-text	[CosmicText]	Advanced text shaping, layout, and Unicode support using CosmicText engine.

Minimal example

use soft_ratatui::embedded_graphics_unicodefonts::{
    mono_8x13_atlas, mono_8x13_bold_atlas, mono_8x13_italic_atlas,
};
use ratatui::Terminal;
use ratatui::widgets::{Block, Borders, Paragraph, Wrap};
use soft_ratatui::{EmbeddedGraphics, SoftBackend};

fn main() {
    let font_regular = mono_8x13_atlas();
    let font_italic = mono_8x13_italic_atlas();
    let font_bold = mono_8x13_bold_atlas();
    let backend = SoftBackend::<EmbeddedGraphics>::new(
        100,
        50,
        font_regular,
        Some(font_bold),
        Some(font_italic),
    );
    let mut terminal = Terminal::new(backend).unwrap();
    terminal.clear();

    terminal.draw(|frame| {
        let area = frame.area();
        let textik = format!("Hello soft! The window area is {}", area);
        frame.render_widget(
            Paragraph::new(textik)
                .block(Block::new().title("Ratatui").borders(Borders::ALL))
                .wrap(Wrap { trim: false }),
            area,
        );
    });
}

Integrations

• egui integration provided by egui_ratatui. Have a TUI inside your GUI!
• bevy_ratatui integration allows you to turn an existing terminal app built with bevy_ratatui into a native or web app. The best way to build a terminal app!!
• bevy game engine examples provided in the repo, so you can create your own game UI or world textures with ratatui
• WASM compatible, deploy your ratatui application on the web!

See also

• mousefood - a no-std embedded-graphics backend for Ratatui!
• ratzilla - Build terminal-themed web applications with Rust and WebAssembly.
• ratatui-wgpu - A wgpu based rendering backend for ratatui.
• bevy_ratatui_camera - A bevy plugin for rendering your bevy app to the terminal using ratatui.

Cool BDF fonts

• spleen (works best, many sizes)
• cozette (very pretty)

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0. Pick whichever suits you.

Status

Comments and suggestions are appreciated.