d10n

d10n / tui-globe

Public

3D globe ratatui widget rendered with braille

19
0
85% credibility
Found May 31, 2026 at 19 stars -- GitGems finds repos before they trend. Get early access to the next one.
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AI Analysis
Rust
AI Summary

tui-globe is a program that displays a beautiful, interactive 3D globe visualization directly in your terminal window. It renders Earth's continents and coastlines using special dot characters, creating a unique visual effect. The globe slowly rotates on its own, but you can also grab it with your mouse to spin it in any direction and scroll to zoom in for a closer look. The geographic data comes from public domain sources and is built into the program, so everything works immediately after installation.

How It Works

1
🌍 You discover a spinning Earth in your terminal

Someone shows you a program that draws a beautiful 3D globe right inside a text window, and it slowly rotates all by itself.

2
📦 You install it on your computer

You download and install the program using a simple command, and everything sets itself up automatically.

3
✨ You launch it and watch in amazement

A gorgeous globe appears, with detailed coastlines and landmasses rendered in delicate dot patterns, slowly spinning before your eyes.

4
🖱️ You reach out and grab the globe

You click and drag across the globe to spin it in any direction, exploring different views of our planet.

5
🔍 You zoom in to explore

Using your scroll wheel, you zoom in close to see country borders and coastlines in beautiful detail.

🎉 You now have your own interactive globe

Whenever you open your terminal, you can summon this beautiful spinning Earth and explore our world from your desk.

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Star Growth

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AI-Generated Review

What is tui-globe?

tui-globe renders an interactive 3D globe directly in your terminal using Rust. It leverages ratatui, a popular terminal UI framework, and draws the globe using braille characters to create a surprisingly detailed visualization. The map data comes from Natural Earth (public domain geographic data) and includes coastlines, country borders, and state boundaries. You can drag to rotate the globe, scroll to zoom in and out, and it auto-spins by default. The geometry is baked into the binary at compile time with zstd compression, so there are no runtime dependencies beyond the terminal itself.

Why is it gaining traction?

The hook here is novelty: a braille-based globe in a terminal is genuinely surprising the first time you see it. The rendering quality is solid, with proper backface culling, horizon clipping for segments that cross the edge of the globe, and a stipple texture that keeps large landmasses from looking like solid blocks. The build system is well-documented, letting you regenerate geometry at different resolutions (10m, 50m, 110m) or swap in custom shapefiles if you need specialized borders or simplified geometry for smaller binaries.

Who should use this?

This is for Rust developers building terminal applications that need geographic visualization. Think CLI tools for monitoring distributed systems with regional breakdowns, network topology visualizers, or dashboards that need to show geographic data without leaving the terminal. It's also a good fit if you're building a ratatui-based application and want a globe widget. If you need a globe for a web application or desktop GUI, look elsewhere.

Verdict

The project is functional and well-engineered, but with only 19 stars and a credibility score of 0.85%, it's early-stage and niche. The GPL-3.0 license may be a blocker if you need to embed this in proprietary software. The code quality is solid with good test coverage and clippy linting, but the community is essentially just the author right now. Worth evaluating for terminal-native geographic visualization, but factor in the maintenance risk of a small, single-maintainer project.

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