# 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/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. ### Code formatting Run `cargo make format` before committing to ensure that code is consistently formatted with rustfmt. Configuration is in [`rustfmt.toml`](./rustfmt.toml). ### 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. ### Run CI tests before pushing a PR Running `cargo make ci` before pushing will perform the same checks that we do in the CI process. It's not mandatory to do this before pushing, however it may save you time to do so instead of waiting for GitHub to run the checks. ### 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/ratatui.git cd ratatui cargo make build ``` ### Tests The [test coverage](https://app.codecov.io/gh/ratatui/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.: - - ### 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 [VS Code 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]`` ### Deprecation notice We generally want to wait at least two versions before removing deprecated items, so users have time to update. However, if a deprecation is blocking for us to implement a new feature we may *consider* removing it in a one version notice. ### 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/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, 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/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 #[]()``` - Then, paste the original issues **opening** text You can then resume the conversation by replying to this new issue you have created.