But as a first release, I'm wondering if it maybe misses what Ruby really enables. The Hello World example has both init and initialize methods? message.to_s == "q"? @style.render?

I remember reading Eloquent Ruby and having my mind completely blown with the clarity and expressiveness that Ruby's metaprogramming enabled. It remains, in my opinion, one of the best programming books of all time for just how mind expanding it was and how it really made the case for Ruby and why there is no other language like Ruby.

I highly recommend that the authors go pick up a copy and then think about how it would influence their API design, I think there's a much more... eloquent approach feasible here, and it would be a pretty incredible way to build small/simple TUI apps.

Since you asked for ideas in a different comment, here's something I put into my notcurses wrapper: grid and flex "css" layouts. Meaning the ability to say whatever.fixed(cols,...) and whatever.flex(:fr1) or whatever.grid(:fr1) and the ability to do a "grid-template-areas" style ascci art ala https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Grid...

Also, Marco (library creator) was just awarded the Rails Luminary award![1]

[1]: https://rubyonrails.org/2025/12/17/marco-roth-2025-rails-lum...

Off-topic: it'd be nice to have a configuration spec to define the look (and maybe even the behaviour) of the different CLI & TUI libraries out there. For things like colours/borders/corners/shadows/scroll- & progressbars etc.

Right now every library does its own thing, which can be quite jarring when using different apps.

See also: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby

While I appreciate Charm's aesthetics, I worry it leans too heavily on GUI paradigms, like popovers and buttons, rather than prioritizing the optimal keyboard efficiency used in traditional text-based interfaces.

Will definitely keep this in mind.