ratatui/CONTRIBUTING.md

# Contribution guidelines

First off, thank you for considering contributing to Ratatui.

If your contribution is not straightforward, please first discuss the change you wish to make by
creating a new issue before making the change, or starting a discussion on
[discord](https://discord.gg/pMCEU9hNEj).

## Reporting issues

Before reporting an issue on the [issue tracker](https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui/issues),
please check that it has not already been reported by searching for some related keywords. Please
also check [`tui-rs` issues](https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs/issues/) and link any related issues
found.

## Pull requests

All contributions are obviously welcome. Please include as many details as possible in your PR
description to help the reviewer (follow the provided template). Make sure to highlight changes
which may need additional attention or you are uncertain about. Any idea with a large scale impact
on the crate or its users should ideally be discussed in a "Feature Request" issue beforehand.

### Keep PRs small, intentional and focused

Try to do one pull request per change. The time taken to review a PR grows exponential with the size
of the change. Small focused PRs will generally be much more faster to review. PRs that include both
refactoring (or reformatting) with actual changes are more difficult to review as every line of the
change becomes a place where a bug may have been introduced. Consider splitting refactoring /
reformatting changes into a separate PR from those that make a behavioral change, as the tests help
guarantee that the behavior is unchanged.

### Search `tui-rs` for similar work

The original fork of Ratatui, [`tui-rs`](https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs/), has a large amount of
history of the project. Please search, read, link, and summarize any relevant
[issues](https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs/issues/),
[discussions](https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs/discussions/) and [pull
requests](https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs/pulls).

### Use conventional commits

We use [conventional commits](https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/) and check for them as
a lint build step. To help adhere to the format, we recommend to install
[Commitizen](https://commitizen-tools.github.io/commitizen/). By using this tool you automatically
follow the configuration defined in [.cz.toml](.cz.toml). Your commit messages should have enough
information to help someone reading the [CHANGELOG](./CHANGELOG.md) understand what is new just from
the title. The summary helps expand on that to provide information that helps provide more context,
describes the nature of the problem that the commit is solving and any unintuitive effects of the
change. It's rare that code changes can easily communicate intent, so make sure this is clearly
documented.

### Clean up your commits

The final version of your PR that will be committed to the repository should be rebased and tested
against main. Every commit will end up as a line in the changelog, so please squash commits that are
only formatting or incremental fixes to things brought up as part of the PR review. Aim for a single
commit (unless there is a strong reason to stack the commits). See [Git Best Practices - On Sausage
Making](https://sethrobertson.github.io/GitBestPractices/#sausage) for more on this.

### Run CI tests before pushing a PR

We're using [cargo-husky](https://github.com/rhysd/cargo-husky) to automatically run git hooks,
which will run `cargo make ci` before each push. To initialize the hook  run `cargo test`. If
`cargo-make` is not installed, it will provide instructions to install it for you. This will ensure
that your code is formatted, compiles and passes all tests before you push. If you need to skip this
check, you can use `git push --no-verify`.

### Sign your commits

We use commit signature verification, which will block commits from being merged via the UI unless
they are signed. To set up your machine to sign commits, see [managing commit signature
verification](https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/managing-commit-signature-verification/about-commit-signature-verification)
in GitHub docs.

## Implementation Guidelines

### Setup

Clone the repo and build it using [cargo-make](https://sagiegurari.github.io/cargo-make/)

Ratatui is an ordinary Rust project where common tasks are managed with
[cargo-make](https://github.com/sagiegurari/cargo-make/). It wraps common `cargo` commands with sane
defaults depending on your platform of choice. Building the project should be as easy as running
`cargo make build`.

```shell
git clone https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui.git
cd ratatui
cargo make build
```

### Tests

The [test coverage](https://app.codecov.io/gh/ratatui-org/ratatui) of the crate is reasonably
good, but this can always be improved. Focus on keeping the tests simple and obvious and write unit
tests for all new or modified code. Beside the usual doc and unit tests, one of the most valuable
test you can write for Ratatui is a test against the `TestBackend`. It allows you to assert the
content of the output buffer that would have been flushed to the terminal after a given draw call.
See `widgets_block_renders` in [tests/widgets_block.rs](./tests/widget_block.rs) for an example.

When writing tests, generally prefer to write unit tests and doc tests directly in the code file
being tested rather than integration tests in the `tests/` folder.

If an area that you're making a change in is not tested, write tests to characterize the existing
behavior before changing it. This helps ensure that we don't introduce bugs to existing software
using Ratatui (and helps make it easy to migrate apps still using `tui-rs`).

For coverage, we have two [bacon](https://dystroy.org/bacon/) jobs (one for all tests, and one for
unit tests, keyboard shortcuts `v` and `u` respectively) that run
[cargo-llvm-cov](https://github.com/taiki-e/cargo-llvm-cov) to report the coverage. Several plugins
exist to show coverage directly in your editor. E.g.:

- <https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ryanluker.vscode-coverage-gutters>
- <https://github.com/alepez/vim-llvmcov>

### Documentation

Here are some guidelines for writing documentation in Ratatui.  
Every public API **must** be documented.

Keep in mind that Ratatui tends to attract beginner Rust users that may not be familiar with Rust
concepts.

#### Content

The main doc comment should talk about the general features that the widget supports and introduce
the concepts pointing to the various methods. Focus on interaction with various features and giving
enough information that helps understand why you might want something.

Examples should help users understand a particular usage, not test a feature. They should be as
simple as possible.  
Prefer hiding imports and using wildcards to keep things concise. Some imports may still be shown
to demonstrate a particular non-obvious import (e.g. `Stylize` trait to use style methods).  
Speaking of `Stylize`, you should use it over the more verbose style setters:

```rust
let style = Style::new().red().bold();
// not
let style = Style::default().fg(Color::Red).add_modifier(Modifiers::BOLD);
```

#### Format

- First line is summary, second is blank, third onward is more detail  
```rust
/// Summary
///
/// A detailed description
/// with examples.
fn foo() {}
```

- Max line length is 100 characters  
See [vscode rewrap extension](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stkb.rewrap)

- Doc comments are above macros  
i.e.
```rust
/// doc comment
#[derive(Debug)]
struct Foo {}
```

- Code items should be between backticks  
i.e. ``[`Block`]``, **NOT** ``[Block]``

### Use of unsafe for optimization purposes

We don't currently use any unsafe code in Ratatui, and would like to keep it that way. However there
may be specific cases that this becomes necessary in order to avoid slowness. Please see [this
discussion](https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui/discussions/66) for more about the decision.

## Continuous Integration

We use Github Actions for the CI where we perform the following checks:

- The code should compile on `stable` and the Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV).
- The tests (docs, lib, tests and examples) should pass.
- The code should conform to the default format enforced by `rustfmt`.
- The code should not contain common style issues `clippy`.

You can also check most of those things yourself locally using `cargo make ci` which will offer you
a shorter feedback loop than pushing to github.

## Relationship with `tui-rs`

This project was forked from [`tui-rs`](https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs/) in February 2023, with the
[blessing of the original author](https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs/issues/654), Florian Dehau
([@fdehau](https://github.com/fdehau)).

The original repository contains all the issues, PRs and discussion that were raised originally, and
it is useful to refer to when contributing code, documentation, or issues with Ratatui.

We imported all the PRs from the original repository and implemented many of the smaller ones and
made notes on the leftovers. These are marked as draft PRs and labelled as [imported from
tui](https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22imported+from+tui%22).
We have documented the current state of those PRs, and anyone is welcome to pick them up and
continue the work on them.

We have not imported all issues opened on the previous repository. For that reason, anyone wanting
to **work on or discuss** an issue will have to follow the following workflow:

- Recreate the issue
- Start by referencing the **original issue**: ```Referencing issue #[<issue number>](<original
  issue link>)```
- Then, paste the original issues **opening** text

You can then resume the conversation by replying to this new issue you have created.