Backends

Ratatui interfaces with the terminal emulator through a backend. These libraries enable Ratatui via the Terminal type to draw styled text to the screen, manipulate the cursor, and interrogate properties of the terminal such as the console or window size. Your application will generally also use the backend directly to capture keyboard, mouse and window events, and enable raw mode and the alternate screen.

Ratatui supports the following backends:

• Crossterm via CrosstermBackend and the crossterm feature (enabled by default). Also see Crossterm version compatibility below for details on selecting specific versions.
• Termion via TermionBackend and the termion feature.
• Termwiz via TermwizBackend and the termwiz feature.
• A TestBackend which can be useful to unit test your application’s UI

For information on how to choose a backend see: Comparison

Each backend supports Raw Mode (which changes how the terminal handles input and output processing), an Alternate Screen which allows it to render to a separate buffer than your shell commands use, and Mouse Capture, which allows your application to capture mouse events.

Crossterm version compatibility

Avoid pulling in multiple semver-incompatible Crossterm versions. Different major versions:

• keep separate event queues (which can lead to race conditions and lost events),
• track raw mode separately (so raw mode may not be restored correctly on exit),
• cannot exchange types even when names match (leading to compilation errors).

Also, specific versions may make it difficult to upgrade Ratatui/widgets unless everything is up to date.

As a mitigation, Ratatui 0.30+ supports multiple Crossterm major versions via crossterm_{version} feature flags. You can select which version to use and avoid conflicts in your dependency graph.

For example:

ratatui = { version = "0.30", features = ["crossterm_0_28"] }
crossterm = "0.28"

# or
ratatui = { version = "0.30", features = ["crossterm_0_29"] }
crossterm = "0.29

Note

• If multiple flags are enabled, Ratatui selects the latest.
• The ratatui-crossterm crate exposes the same flags.
• Use cargo tree -p crossterm to check your graph and disable default features on dependencies that drag in another Crossterm major.
• Ratatui 0.30+ introduces ratatui-core, moving backends into separate crates so backend changes can evolve independently of the main library. This also helps avoid version conflicts in applications that only need one backend.