Hello again everyone!
Made a little write up about where we stand: TUIs everywhere | mcass19 + announcing my talk at Code BEAM Europe 
mcass19
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shashi
Hey,
I copy pasted the code in your OP into iex and I counted 30 up arrow presses, but got only 25 in the counter. It seems to be dropping some events from the poll… I also created a standalone app, where I can reproduce the issue: if I type hello world I might get “helo wld” echoed dropping a few chars.
I’m pretty sure I’m missing something obvious.
Shashi
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mcass19
Hi @shashi , thanks for trying out the library!
And thanks for the clean repro. This isn’t poll_event losing events, it’s two readers competing for the same stdin.
When you run inside iex, the BEAM’s own terminal driver (the iex shell’s line reader) reads stdin continuously, even while our loop is running. ex_ratatui’s poll path (crossterm) reads the same file descriptor directly. In raw mode each keystroke byte goes to whichever read() grabs it first, so under fast input some bytes get swallowed by the shell reader and never reach the TUI. You can usually even see those swallowed keystrokes land at the iex prompt once you quit the TUI.
Try to run it outside the interactive shell with e.g.: elixir echo_chat.exs, and verify if you keep seeing chars being dropped.
This is a structural iex BEAM-TUI gotcha rather than an issue in the polling code, but it clearly needs documenting up front. So thanks a ton for this. For anything beyond a quick local iex the library is built to run as a proper process. Under a supervisor, as a release/escript, or served remotely over SSH or Erlang distribution. None of those share stdin with an interactive shell, so the race simply can’t happen.
Please let me know if anything’s unclear or you have any other questions. Thank you a lot again!
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mcass19
Update: fixed in 0.11.1!
The cause was a race over stdin: when running locally (iex but also just elixir or mix run), the BEAM’s own tty reader and crossterm were both pulling from the terminal, so some keys went to the BEAM and never reached the poll loop, causing the dropped arrows/characters.
We now hand the local tty off to crossterm so there’s a single reader. It only kicks in automatically on the :local backend, so no code changes are needed and it doesn’t affect any other transport.
Let me know if you still see drops after upgrading, or if you have any other questions or feedback. Thank you again @shashi!
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mcass19
Hello everyone!
0.12 is out. Headline: the precompiled linux musl NIFs are now truly self-contained. They used to depend on libgcc_s, which stock musl systems (Alpine containers, embedded rootfs…) don’t have, so the NIF failed to load right where you’d most want a precompiled binary. Verified on actual hardware! Details in the changelog. Plus some smaller fixes and improvements.
0.13 brings Burrito support! Run mix ex_ratatui.gen.burrito and your TUI builds as a single self-contained executable for linux, macOS and windows. End users download one file and run it, no Elixir install needed. There’s a new packaging guide, a reference demo in the repo, and --ci github scaffolds a workflow that publishes the binaries to GitHub Releases on every tag. So really: one mix task away from handing out your TUI as an executable.
As always, if you give something a try and issues/feedback/ideas appears, please let me know!
Meanwhile… I slowly started building a demo or two for the Code BEAM Europe talk. Looking good 
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