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Ratatui patterns

Skill uwuclxdy/agenticat/skills/ratatui-patterns

Some of my Agents & Skills, compatible with most AI coding tools

Install
npx -y skills add uwuclxdy/agenticat --skill ratatui-patterns

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

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  • 5 stars5 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

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Modern-ratatui knowledge pack for writing, refactoring, or reviewing Rust TUI code on ratatui or crossterm. Use when touching TUI widgets, layout, styling, or event loops; writing TestBackend render tests; or resolving ratatui version upgrades and API questions.

SKILL.md

3.8 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Ratatui Patterns

Modern-ratatui knowledge pack. Current stable: ratatui 0.30.2 (2026-06). Model training data predates 0.29. The biggest failure mode is reimplementing by hand what the library now provides; the second is asserting API shapes from memory. Both have the same fix: work from the bundled references, not from memory.

Hard Rules

  1. Before writing any TUI render/layout/lifecycle code, read references/modernization-checklist.md. If the thing being built appears in it, use the built-in.
  2. Before claiming an API exists or writing a signature, verify it in references/api-reference.md (generated from ratatui source, grep-friendly). If it is not there and not in references/limitations.md, pull live docs (below) before hand-rolling.
  3. Custom render code is allowed only for needs listed in references/limitations.md (the verified beyond-API catalog). Anything else custom is a defect.
  4. Render logic ships with TestBackend tests per references/testing.md.
  5. Depend only on the ratatui umbrella crate, never on ratatui-core/-widgets directly. If default-features = false, re-add layout-cache.
  6. Mouse events are opt-in. ratatui::init()/run() do not enable mouse capture; that needs EnableMouseCapture/DisableMouseCapture around the loop (references/api-reference.md §14).
  7. The event loop can go async (crossterm's event-stream feature + EventStream for tokio::select!); Terminal::draw stays sync regardless (references/api-reference.md §14).

Files

filewhen to read
references/modernization-checklist.mdalways, first: hand-rolled → built-in map + hunt greps
references/api-reference.mdexact signatures, feature flags, full widget/API surface, events (mouse capture, sync vs async loop, kitty key flags)
references/limitations.mdbefore writing custom render code; design-system conformance limits
references/testing.mdwriting or reviewing TUI tests
references/patterns.mdcomposition idioms, corrected cookbook, widget-choice guidance
references/audit-prompt.mdfanning out per-repo modernization audits

Live Docs, on Demand

For anything the bundled references don't answer 1:1, fetch instead of guessing:

  • API detail: https://docs.rs/ratatui/latest/ratatui/ (append module path, e.g. widgets/struct.Table.html)
  • release highlights: https://ratatui.rs/highlights/v0302/ (version digits, no dots)
  • breaking changes: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ratatui/ratatui/main/BREAKING-CHANGES.md
  • concepts/recipes: https://ratatui.rs/concepts/ and https://ratatui.rs/recipes/
  • version check: curl -s -H 'User-Agent: ratatui-version-check' https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/ratatui (a bare curl without User-Agent gets policy-blocked)

If crates.io reports a version newer than the one at the top of this file, flag it before trusting the bundled references; they get re-synced upstream per release.

Related

  • design language (colors, spacing, motion grammar): the project's design-language skill, if it has one. That skill says WHAT it should look like; this one says WHICH ratatui API renders it.
  • panic-safe teardown + shimmer recipe: under 0.30, ratatui::init() already installs the restore panic hook; hand-rolled guards are only for extra seams like bracketed paste or kitty flags. Kitty flags are what let you tell Shift+Enter/Ctrl+Enter apart from plain Enter, see references/api-reference.md §14.

Keep looking

Skills are one crate of 328,083. Ordering is by how many stacks a row turns up in, so the top of any crate is what has actually been picked rather than what has the most stars.