Mauricio Cassola

Software Engineer

Mauricio is a freelance software engineer who has been building production Elixir systems for ~8 years. He’s the author of ex_ratatui (Elixir bindings for Rust’s ratatui) and related libraries. His work explores where terminal UIs fit and leverage the BEAM alongside web and embedded surfaces, from Livebook prototypes to e-ink panels on Nerves hardware. Originally from Uruguay, currently based in The Netherlands, and increasingly convinced that his love for TUIs deserves more space in the modern stack.

Talk:
TUIs Everywhere

What if terminal UIs were a first-class option on the BEAM, with the same OTP supervision, observability, and remote-attach story you already trust?

ExRatatui brings Rust’s ratatui to Elixir via precompiled Rustler NIFs with ~20 widgets, a constraint-based layout engine, OTP-supervised apps with LiveView-style callbacks (or an Elm-flavoured reducer runtime), and transport-agnostic apps that run identically over a local terminal, SSH, or Erlang distribution.

The talk aims to include a live demo — a small web game the audience can play from their phones in the room — and walks through the use cases that emerged once TUIs became cheap to build on the BEAM: personal CLI tools, rapid prototyping inside Livebook (kino_ex_ratatui), Phoenix LiveView panels rendering the same TUI in a browser, and embedded e-ink screens via cell-buffer transport.

You’ll leave knowing when a TUI is the right answer, what’s already possible today, and how OTP makes TUIs more interesting than they are in most ecosystems.

Key Takeaways:

  • Full-featured TUIs are a real option on Elixir today, with no Rust toolchain required.
  • The same TUI module runs locally, over SSH, in a Livebook cell, on an e-ink panel, or inside a LiveView. You pick the transport.
  • OTP supervision + remote attach turns ad-hoc CLI tools into long-lived, observable, multi-user surfaces.

Target Audience:

  • Elixir developers curious about TUIs, operators who want observability surfaces beyond logs, Nerves/embedded folks looking for richer interfaces on small screens, and anyone who’d reach for a TUI in another language and didn’t realize the BEAM could match it.