trolley

Hi HN, I thought you may find my screenwriting software interesting, even if you aren't writing yourself. It's built with Roc[0], a functional language compiling to machine code, where I/O is provided by a concept called "platforms". Is Bliss Writer's case, the platform is in Rust, using Crossterm and bits of Ratatui. This is all then packaged by Trolley[1], which ships bundles the TUI with Ghostty, similarly to how Electron bundles webapps with a browser. It's pretty fast for a beta. You can use Ctrl+Shift+Alt+0 for an frame-time monitor [0] https://www.roc-lang.org/ [1] https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

Yep, that's about it. I am making a TUI for non-techies, packing it with Ghostty, and sending it to non-techies to use: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

They should just use Trolley[0] which will ship their TUI inside Ghostty. [0]: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

TUIs are so nice. Please consider using Trolley to package this for non-technical users: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

I use libghostty for Trolley[0], which packages TUIs as desktop apps, like Electron does for web apps. It really is quite an amazing piece of software. I just wrapped it in a useful GUI and a bundle/package CLI and it just works. Even on Windows. Kudos to the Ghostty developers. [0] https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

A thing that shocked me as I was working on the text editor was how capable modern terminal emulators are when you account for ANSI extensions. First-class clipboard access, mouse events, precise text styling, focus tracking, system notifications, key press/release events, etc. are all possible with a modern terminal emulator. There's not really anything else you need to build a very competent, ergonomic editor UI. You can even use tools like trolley to wrap the entire application up in a ghostty-powered shim that presents the application as a native UI application: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

Shameless related plug for my recent project Trolley, which lets you package a TUI as a desktop app, for your non-technical users or otherwise: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

somehwere else in this thread this project was mentioned (uses libghostty): https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley that might be a viable approach for you

I'm the author of Trolley[0] (Electron for TUIs). It was so easy to get the terminal functionality going with `libghostty`. Most time was spent building the functionality around it. Thanks for making it. [0]: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

Happy to share the early version of Trolley, which will package your TUI app with Ghostty for non-technical users on MacOS and Linux, with Windows being a WIP. This came about after writing a small TUI to allow a friend to back up their entire Vimeo library, and finding that while they enjoyed the simplicity and speed of the TUI, they did not like having to use the shell to get there, nor did they want to install a terminal like Ghostty for a better experience. Trolley makes it easy to package apps for that kind of person. It's still very early, but I thought it'd be interesting to get some feedback, so let me know what you think. If you're developing a TUI or considering a hog like Electron for an app that can be text-based, give Trolley a look.