My friend and I are huge Neovim nerds. We like to rice our terminals and our editors. We just wanted a harness that we can do the same with, rice it till our hearts' desire. So, we started looking out for harnesses. Pi was great, Pi was good. But in the end, it was JavaScript. I don't have anything against JavaScript, but Lua is more fitting, and I can just as easily base it in Rust to make it even faster. So, we started cooking, and we ended up with a design that's minimal at its core and is built using Lua. Every built-in abstraction, the way you define providers, the way you rice it up, everything, literally everything, you can do in Lua.

But how? How does it all work? I proposed we just do it the Ratatui way, but my friend was like, nah! We shall make it possible to build TUIs in Lua. (Weirdo!) But it paid off, and we got ourselves a shiny new Lua library, ito!!!

He didn't get the gravity of the situation. We had an awesome terminal UI library in Lua! I wanted everyone to know how cool that is, so I got cooking, wrote myself a custom canvas implementation of this library instead of the usual terminal adaptor, exported it as wasm, and made this super cool website where you can experiment building awesome UIs in Lua. For vibe-coders, we got an llms.txt too. Have at it, and see if you can build something really cool with it. The library's at github.com/uji-labs/ito, and the awesome sauce harness is at github.com/uji-labs/uji.

I hope you like it!

  ui.Button "Button Text" {
    on_click = function()
      print("Hello world")
    end,
    disabled = true
  }

  ui.VStack {
    padding = 31, -- Named key => option
    wrap = true,
  
    ui.Button "..." {}, -- Indexed by number => children
  }