The Text Widget

The text widget renders styled text in the terminal. It’s a fundamental building block for displaying formatted content with colors, modifiers, and multiple lines. Text is built from Line objects, which are in turn composed of Span objects.

Interface

val text: fn(
  ?#style: &Style,
  ?#alignment: &[Alignment, null],
  &[Array<Line>, string]
) -> Tui;

The text widget uses types from the style module including Style, Line, Span, Color, Modifier, and Alignment.

Text Hierarchy

• Span: A single segment of text with a single style
• Line: A collection of spans forming one line
• Text: A collection of lines forming multi-line content

Examples

Basic Usage

use tui;
use tui::text;

text(&"Hello, World!")

Status Messages

use tui;
use tui::text;

let make_status = |level, msg| select level {
    `Error => line([
        span(#style: style(#fg: `Red, #add_modifier: [`Bold]), "ERROR: "),
        span(msg)
    ]),
    `Warning => line([
        span(#style: style(#fg: `Yellow, #add_modifier: [`Bold]), "WARNING: "),
        span(msg)
    ]),
    `Info => line([
        span(#style: style(#fg: `Cyan), "INFO: "),
        span(msg)
    ])
};

text(&[
    make_status(`Info, "Application started"),
    make_status(`Warning, "Cache miss"),
    make_status(`Error, "Connection failed")
])

Dynamic Colors

use tui;
use tui::text;

let count = 0;
let timer = time::timer(duration:1.s, true);
count <- timer ~ (count + 1);

let colors = [`Red, `Green, `Yellow, `Blue, `Magenta, `Cyan];
let color = colors[count % array::len(colors)]$;

let l = line([
    span(#style: style(#fg: `White), "Count: "),
    span(#style: style(#fg: color, #add_modifier: [`Bold]), "[count]")
]);

text(&[l])

Alignment

use tui;
use tui::text;

text(&[
    line(#alignment: `Left, "Left aligned"),
    line(#alignment: `Center, "Centered"),
    line(#alignment: `Right, "Right aligned")
])

Color Support

• Named colors: Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Magenta, Cyan, White, Black, Gray, DarkGray, and Light* variants
• Indexed colors: Indexed(202) for 256-color palette
• RGB colors: Rgb({r: 255, g: 100, b: 50}) for true color

Text Modifiers

• Bold, Italic, Underlined, CrossedOut
• SlowBlink, RapidBlink (terminal support varies)
• Reversed, Hidden

See Also

• paragraph - For wrapped and scrollable text
• block - For containing text with borders
• list - For selectable text items