Charm Ruby – Glamorous Terminal Libraries for Ruby | Hacker News Reader

Charm Ruby – Glamorous Terminal Libraries for Ruby

charm-ruby.dev

155 pointstodsacerdoti29 comments

Charm team member here. Ruby and Go are my favorite languages. Excited to see this come to life!

Would be awesome to see this come under the Charm umbrella

Bookmarked, I think this is a really good idea and could lead to some really small, elegant TUI code.

But as a first release, I'm wondering if it maybe misses what Ruby really enables. The Hello World example has both init and initialize methods? message.to_s == "q"? @style.render?

I remember reading Eloquent Ruby and having my mind completely blown with the clarity and expressiveness that Ruby's metaprogramming enabled. It remains, in my opinion, one of the best programming books of all time for just how mind expanding it was and how it really made the case for Ruby and why there is no other language like Ruby.

I highly recommend that the authors go pick up a copy and then think about how it would influence their API design, I think there's a much more... eloquent approach feasible here, and it would be a pretty incredible way to build small/simple TUI apps.

the author of these libraries is a very experienced ruby coder... I'm sure there's a reason for that code:

to_s normalizes code down to a string that can be compared when the object could be arbitrary and might not implement ==

init is one of the three core framework methods for the elm pattern.

Thanks for the feedback!

And yeah, I agree. I'm not super happy with some of the APIs as they aren't really idiomatic Ruby. It's also something I mentioned in the blog post that I want to improve: https://marcoroth.dev/posts/glamorous-christmas

For now, I just wanted to get them out so we as a community can build them out together. Most of the APIs are just 1:1 "ports" of their Go counterparts and might feel off or a bit too low level because of that.

I feel sad for CLI tools shift from pure text to pseudo-graphics. A lot of text advantages is lost, few GUI strengths are met.

They can still output pure text depending on whether the tool's is getting piped etc. I think some commands do work like this

How funny. I just spent the weekend AI slopping an FFI wrapper around notcurses because I couldn't find anything else. This looks amazing!

Since you asked for ideas in a different comment, here's something I put into my notcurses wrapper: grid and flex "css" layouts. Meaning the ability to say whatever.fixed(cols,...) and whatever.flex(:fr1) or whatever.grid(:fr1) and the ability to do a "grid-template-areas" style ascci art ala https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Grid...

> ... couldn't find anything else

Anything else meaning...? Ruby specific TUI library? I've been toying around with a lot of TUI's recently, landed on Textual (Python) for my most recent experiemnt, but Charm has been on my list to try out when I get a chance. There are also a number of other libs that will let you build quite robust applications in a number of languages (Rust, Python, Go, PHP, and those are just the one's I am aware of).

Indeed, looking for Ruby-specific stuff. There are a couple of ncurses wrappers that are not the friendliest things and at the other end of the spectrum there's the "TTY" code which, while nice isn't powerful enough to do what I was wanting to do.

I'm excited to take a look at this! Using Charmbracelet's libraries for TUIs is part of why I learned Go. Ruby's TUI story has generally been underdeveloped by comparison.

Also, Marco (library creator) was just awarded the Rails Luminary award![1]

[1]: https://rubyonrails.org/2025/12/17/marco-roth-2025-rails-lum...

I always loved Charm's aesthetics and it really opened my eyes with what can be done with TUIs. But I never felt like I wanted to learn Go just to be able to use these libraries. Ruby is magical in it's own way, so it just felt right to bring these libraries over to Ruby!

This is really cool! It looks like Marco and I had the same idea around the same time, but we picked different TUI libraries to wrap. :-D

Ruby is my favorite language for writing CLI scripts/apps. I've been feeling the TUI options for ruby feel a bit dated, and I've been secretly wanting charm for ruby for a while. I'm very excited to use this.

Looks great, I'm definitely going to have a look at it.

Off-topic: it'd be nice to have a configuration spec to define the look (and maybe even the behaviour) of the different CLI & TUI libraries out there. For things like colours/borders/corners/shadows/scroll- & progressbars etc.

Right now every library does its own thing, which can be quite jarring when using different apps.

I guess, to a degree, this is what lipgloss is trying to be/solve: https://github.com/marcoroth/lipgloss-ruby

To a degree, yes, but I was thinking something in the line of a commonly agreed on file format that defines a default style. To be used by libraries like charm, ratatui, tty, heck maybe even older ones like libnewt etc.

A bit like base16 but with more definitions and better semantics.

What are popular charm/bubbletea based TUIs? I use TUIs often, but for some reason none of them are based on charm/bubbletea? Might be coincidence though.

While I appreciate Charm's aesthetics, I worry it leans too heavily on GUI paradigms, like popovers and buttons, rather than prioritizing the optimal keyboard efficiency used in traditional text-based interfaces.

I like the terminal-based LLM tool, Crush. I find it handy in that I can pull it into any IDE and it works the same.

- https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush

This is like a dream come true, fantastic! Regarding the spinner component, can I create multiple of those in the terminal and have them run concurrently? That is one of the features that lots of gems have been lacking in Ruby, at least from what I've found. Tty-progressbar is the only gem I've found that can do this.

Yeah definitely! When you use them in the bubbletea `view` you can render multiple bubbles components at the same time.

Charm's tui library is fantastic. This combined with ruby's ease of use will make writing cli apps more fun!

Sorry for the semi-off topic question but does anyone know if there is something similar for Rust or if there's a good starting point for building an FFI for Charm in Rust? I'm curious to know if I can integrate Charm into my existing projects because I absolutely love their tools!

Somebody mentioned Ratatui to me today: https://docs.rs/ratatui/latest/ratatui/index.html

Oh! I wonder how I never noticed this before, thank you!

I maintain a huh clone: https://github.com/jdx/demand

Interesting, huge fan of charm and ruby.

Will definitely keep this in mind.

Definitely just the beginning. Any ideas or feedback is very much appreciated as we build out these libraries!

What was the biggest challenge refactoring it from Go to Ruby?

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