What is ratty?

Ratty is a terminal emulator written in Rust that renders its interface on the GPU and can display inline three dimensional graphics inside the terminal itself. It combines the Ratatui terminal UI library with the Bevy game engine, and its most distinctive feature is a spinning three dimensional rat cursor that replaces the usual blinking text cursor. Beyond the traditional two dimensional terminal view, Ratty has a separate three dimensional mode that can be toggled with a keyboard shortcut, letting a user see what is effectively behind the flat terminal surface. It also supports inline three dimensional objects placed directly in terminal space through its own protocol, called the Ratty Graphics Protocol, which can register OBJ and GLB model files, position them at specific terminal cell locations, and animate their scale, color, and depth. A companion widget library called ratatui-rgp lets other developers build their own terminal applications that include these inline three dimensional objects, with example programs showing a giant rat model, an editable document with embedded 3D content, and a split pane drawing tool with a live 3D preview. Installation is available through Cargo, the Arch Linux package repository, prebuilt binary releases, or building directly from a Git checkout, and it requires a GPU and graphics stack supported by Bevy and wgpu. Configuration is handled through a TOML file that controls cursor appearance and animation, including which 3D model to use and how it scales and moves. Under the hood, the terminal buffer is drawn on the CPU through Ratatui, text is rendered on the GPU using the Parley and Vello libraries, the result is read back to the CPU, and then copied into an image that Bevy presents in either 2D or 3D. The project's author describes this as a GPU powered bridge rather than a fully GPU resident rendering path, and notes that achieving a fully GPU resident pipeline would require a dedicated Bevy render integration. The code is released under the MIT license.