Improve Showcase Apps

[joshka]

Ideally the showcase should be the apps that best show off what Ratatui can do. Similar pages for inspiration:

https://www.textualize.io/ (scroll down) and https://www.textualize.io/projects/

Ideally our showcase would be visible from the main landing a bit more easily and have more of a sidebar free design.

We also likely should set a minimum bar for visual appeal and drop the bottom portion. (Note that this isn't about whether the apps are objectively good, more subjectively cool).

Where possible we should check for whether there's some good images that update the existing that are better and which might meet the bar.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to have a more consistent framing (i.e. VHS with the macos title bar) for this?

In general, I'd avoid low saturation themes (i.e. gruvbox and the like) as these don't generally pop on a website.

It might be nice to consider screenshots > animations where possible

Some critique (note, this is super pedantic focusing in on the worst aspect of each):

• atuin - screenshot is from 0.7.0 would be nice to update it. image on atuin.sh uses gruvbox
• bandwich - monochromatic boxes. lots of whitespace
• bottom - low saturation brown boxes. lots of whitespace
• csvlens - probably could be a little wider (also, maybe make the headings colored?)
• dua - lots of whitespace, asciicast rather than a gif which means that clicking to animate, low contrast on the title bar
• joshuto - background is a little too busy and lines don't join up well (but it looks good otherwise)
• fzf-make - a little too busy, but looks great. Why is every pane focused?
• gitui - old school 3 bit high contrast ansi colors, could do with some theming work
• gpgtui - unsure what the display is trying to represent. Needs a better visual hierarchy
• material - looks pretty, could may drop the border a bit and make the bottom part have some color
• minesweep-rs - perhaps drop the boxes and use the quadrant blocks instead of rounded borders, use more color, avoid grubbox, less whitespace
• oatmeal - looks great, a bit much whitespace
• oha - needs to join the boxes and borders
• rucola - a little monochromatic / no clear hierarchy
• scope-tui - beautiful, definitely should be animated
• slumber - looks pretty good, perhaps less whitespace on left side?
• taskwarrior-tui - flashbang for the light theme, needs a dark theme, but otherwise looks great, a little too high
• television - the image on the website looks nicer
• xplr - youtube link, use a gif / png instead
• yazi - looks great, even though it's a vid
• openapi-tui - looks neat, maybe a little too much whitespace above the ui?

Note again, lots of that is purely subjective and looking at each of these in comparison to the others with a very high bar.
I think mostly the idea here might be to put some effort into finding new screenshots or adding some PRs to update the various items.

Some items to consider for adding

• https://github.com/matrixfrog/crossword - looks really good imo
• https://github.com/orhun/binsider
• https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy (apparently looks better than the screenshot)
• https://github.com/achristmascarl/rainfrog - may need a bit more contrast

[joshka]

@codex take a look through the existing places where we might expect users to want to add new Apps or widget libraries to the showcase and update some instructions. Do a comprehensive search of previous PRs that attempt to add items to the showcase to get an understanding of when we push back and why by looking at the PR comments / and review feedback. Collate this info into a guidance doc. A good start for this is that the new app should look better than at least 50% of the apps on the site currently (and probably better than the top 10-20% to really be guaranteed to end up on the showcase page). Add a configuration for github issues so that there's an obvious place where we pre-fill some of the instructions around adding showcase apps to help cut down the number of these push backs early. Ideally the docs will help push users towards making really good looking UIs. The Release your app page has some good advice on this.

[joshka]

Looks like codex failed on setting up the environment on this one - oddly succeeds when doing the steps manual, but fails when doing it automatically while trying to run git lfs pull:

+ git lfs install
Updated Git hooks.
Git LFS initialized.
+ git lfs pull
Downloading LFS objects:   0% (0/1), 0 B | 0 B/s
batch request: missing protocol: ""
batch request: missing protocol: ""
Failed to fetch some objects from ''

[orhun]

bad AI