Why does bubbletea use strings/printf rather than a TUI library? about bubbletea HOT 1 CLOSED

Hi! We went with View() string because it's flexible, easy to understand, and usually fast enough for user interfaces.

One of the main things we wanted to do with Bubble Tea is allow other string-based rendering tools (like Glamour) to operate with Bubble Tea very easily. Both of those libraries have very complex ANSI-based styling baked in that would be difficult to translate to a cell-based renderer.

We did find that scrolling on very large views with complex ANSI became an issue on slower terminals, so we added an optional scroll-based rendering API that operates on a very low level, and works alongside the main renderer. The Viewport component takes advantage of this.

In terms of cross-platform compatibility, we thankfully haven't seen any issues so far with Linux, macOS and BSD.

Anyway, all this said, you're completely right about efficiency, and tcell does indeed do a great job there. We're exploring offering an alternative renderer (or renderers) with higher performance and better layout capabilities.

from bubbletea.