Installation and feature flags

Ratatui Kit is a Rust crate. A minimal application needs two kinds of dependencies: ratatui-kit itself and an async runtime. The docs and examples use Tokio.

# Cargo.toml
[dependencies]
ratatui-kit = { version = "0.12.0" }
tokio = { version = "1", features = [
  "rt-multi-thread", "macros", "time",
] }

If you are developing examples inside this repository, they use a workspace path dependency:

Cargo.toml

ratatui-kit = { path = "crates/ratatui-kit", features = ["full"] }

Use full while learning

All repository examples enable full because they cover routing, Atom, input, tree selection, and virtual lists:

ratatui-kit = { version = "0.12.0", features = ["full"] }

full is a good fit when you are:

• Running every example while following the docs.
• Prototyping and do not want to decide feature boundaries yet.
• Writing an internal tool where binary size and dependency count are not the first priority.

Once you start building a library, template, or application that needs tighter dependency control, enable smaller feature sets as needed.

Default features are empty

ratatui-kit has an empty default feature set:

[features]
default = []

That means a bare dependency includes only the core runtime, component model, hooks, layout, text, scrolling, and foundational components. Advanced capabilities are enabled by feature flag:

feature	Enables	Extra dependencies
router	RouterProvider, Outlet, routes!, use_navigate, use_params, RouteState	regex
atom	Atom, AtomState, use_atom	none
input	Input, SearchInput, and the tui_input re-export	tui-input
tree	TreeSelect and the tui_tree_widget re-export	tui-tree-widget
virtual-list	VirtualList and the tui_widget_list re-export	tui-widget-list
textarea	TextArea, soft wrapping and mouse seeking	tui-input, unicode-width
table	Tables with width-aware wrapping	unicode-width
serde	Palette serialization	serde, ratatui/serde
full	All features above	All dependencies above

Examples:

# Search input and confirmation modals only
ratatui-kit = { version = "0.12.0", features = ["input"] }

# Multi-page app + global business state
ratatui-kit = { version = "0.12.0", features = ["router", "atom"] }

# Large data lists
ratatui-kit = { version = "0.12.0", features = ["virtual-list"] }

Choosing features

What you want to build	Recommendation
Basic UI, counters, local state, and ordinary layout	No feature flags
Input / SearchInput	Enable input
Tree selection	Enable tree
Virtual lists or virtual multi-select patterns	Enable virtual-list
Multi-page terminal applications	Enable router
Cross-page shared business state	Enable atom
Following the full docs	Enable full

Modal components themselves do not need the input feature. Modal, ConfirmModal, AlertModal, and ShortcutInfoModal get input isolation from the framework’s core event layer; the input feature only controls the text-input components built on tui-input.

Validate with all-features

Because the default feature set is empty, a plain cargo check can miss gated modules when you change framework source or examples. Repository validation commands must use --all-features:

cargo test --locked --all-features --workspace --lib --tests --examples
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features --workspace -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --all --check

This also matters for documentation maintenance: if a page covers TreeSelect, VirtualList, or Router, verification should compile the corresponding feature.

Multi-line editing

Enable textarea for TextArea, including soft wrapping, keyboard editing and mouse cursor seeking. It uses tui-input and the framework’s own display layer on Ratatui 0.30, and is included in full. Run cargo run --example textarea. For read-only multi-line display use WrappedText.

Next, go to Quick start and run your first terminal interface.