Crates TUI

In the previous tutorials, we were building purely sequentially operating applications. However, there are times when you may be interested in running IO operations or heavy computations in between drawing 2 frames. You can achieve a consistent frame rate for rendering by running these blocking operations in a background thread or task.

This tutorial will walk you through creating an async TUI app that makes an async request to crates.io and lists the results based on a user prompt. This tutorial is a simplified version of the crates-tui application.

Dependencies

Run the following to setup a new project:

cargo new crates-tui-tutorial --bin

Here’s all the dependencies required for this tutorial:

Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
color-eyre = "0.6.2"
crates_io_api = "0.9.0"
crossterm = { version = "0.27.0", features = ["serde", "event-stream"] }
futures = "0.3.28"
itertools = "0.12.0"
ratatui = { version = "0.26.1", features = ["serde", "macros"] }
tokio = { version = "1.36.0", features = ["full"] }
tokio-stream = "0.1.14"
tui-input = "0.8.0"

Copy these dependencies into your Cargo.toml’s dependencies section.

Note

tokio is an asynchronous runtime for the Rust programming language. It provides the building blocks needed for writing network applications. We recommend you read the Tokio documentation.

You may also want to check out the documentation of crates_io_api before we begin.

This is what your folder structure should now look like:

.
├── Cargo.lock
├── Cargo.toml
└── src
   └── main.rs

Let’s go through making these files one by one, starting with main.rs.