Dual backend support (ssh/crossterm + wasm/webgl)

[lukexor]

I wasn't able to find any issues or examples that demonstrate this. After watching your ratzilla talk, the dream is to have a ratatui binary that works in both a terminal and the Web simultaneously.

My current application starts an ssh server, and the terminal application is started when you ssh to it. I'd like to be able to also start a web server that serves the same app using the webgl backend when a user navigates to it.

Given the core API differences with key events and draw_web, does this seem possible/reasonable?

[orhun]

Hello! 🐀

I think what you are looking for is a setup like in this project: https://github.com/Patryk27/kartoffels

It uses russh + Ratatui to create an SSH app (examples here) and xterm.js to serve it on web.

But I think we should eventually support a way of doing that with Ratzilla though (for better performance + Rust nativeness)
I need to experiment with it first to see how easy that would be.

cc @junkdog for opinions

[junkdog]

Huh, neat idea!

Someone should make a crate for creating a unified KeyEvent structure for every backend (crossterm, web etc) - or it should go into ratatui core as a trait perhaps. It's a bit if pita to setup all the boilerplate.

Given the core API differences with key events and draw_web, does this seem possible/reasonable?

As long as you unify the key events, it should be fine. I haven't thought much about it, but i'd probably structure it into 4 crates: core (lib), native-tui (lib+bin), web-tui (lib+bin) and finally multi-tui (bin) to make life a bit easier.

Ratzilla doesn't come with an http server, so multi-tui would need to embed one which can serve the index.html and js/wasm files from the executable. I think it maybe requires websockets too, but I haven't checked the docs.

[lukexor]

Thanks for the suggestions! Yeah I'm currently using russh and would probably use trunk/axum to build/serve the html/wasm

I also have a wasm leptos app embedding xtermjs with the webgl plugin and portable_pty with a websocket as a way to ssh from a browser, but I'd love for a more pure Rust solution that didn't involve two different applications running and manual wasm-bindgen glue to xtermjs

[aschey]

Someone should make a crate for creating a unified KeyEvent structure for every backend (crossterm, web etc) - or it should go into ratatui core as a trait perhaps. It's a bit if pita to setup all the boilerplate.

You might be interested in terminput (created for this exact purpose). I just published a web-sys backend for it.