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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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...

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!

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

See also: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby

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.

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

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.

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.

Interesting, huge fan of charm and ruby.

Will definitely keep this in mind.