rust-cli-tui-developer_skill

Overview

This skill provides expert guidance for building Rust command-line interfaces and terminal user interfaces using clap, inquire, and ratatui. It distills official example patterns into practical architectures, integration approaches, and real-world workflows. Use it to design robust CLIs, interactive prompts, and full TUI apps with clear best practices and code-focused guidance.

How this skill works

The skill analyzes official example structures from the clap, inquire, and ratatui libraries and extracts repeatable patterns, integration strategies, and testing/build recipes. It outlines dependency setup, common code idioms (derive macros, prompt flows, layout constraints), and end-to-end application architectures. It also maps concrete example locations so you can inspect and reuse canonical implementations.

When to use it

• When building a command-line tool with argument parsing and subcommands
• When adding interactive prompts or setup wizards to a CLI
• When developing a full terminal user interface with layouts and widgets
• When you need integration patterns for CLI + interactive prompts + TUI
• When designing tests, release builds, or cross-compilation workflows

Best practices

• Follow POSIX-style option naming and provide clear help text
• Start simple: CLI first, then add prompts, then a TUI if needed
• Validate input early and provide escape hatches in interactive flows
• Keep application state separate from rendering logic for TUIs
• Optimize release builds and add CI cross-compile steps for distribution

Example use cases

• A package manager or build tool with clap-driven subcommands and configuration files
• A setup wizard that uses clap for entry and inquire for stepwise configuration
• A system monitoring dashboard built with ratatui and crossterm for real-time updates
• A data-processing CLI that offers interactive filtering and a TUI visualization mode
• A deploy tool that supports scripted automation and an interactive admin TUI