ani-tui, a TUI frontend for ani-cli

[logando-al]

Hi everyone,

I have been a long-time ani-cli user and still love how fast and direct it is.

At the same time, I wanted a more visual way to browse my watch history, resume shows, and discover something new without leaving the terminal.

That led me to build ani-tui: a production-ready terminal UI written in pure Rust that wraps ani-cli and adds a richer local browsing experience on top of it.

Why I built it

ani-cli is excellent at staying fast, lightweight, and keyboard-friendly.

What I wanted was not to replace that, but to add:

• a persistent home screen for browsing
• local watch history and resume flow
• cached metadata for instant startup
• a recommendation layer based on actual watch behavior

So ani-tui uses ani-cli as the playback handoff engine, while handling the UI, local state, and browsing flow itself.

Key features

Curated home screen

• Continue Watching
• Watchlist
• Trending
• Popular
• Top Rated
• Seasonal

These rows are powered by AniList GraphQL metadata and local SQLite state.

Heuristic recommendation engine

There is a local-first Because You Watched flow and a More Like This strip on the detail view.

Recommendations are based on weighted signals such as:

• watch history
• genre overlap
• format similarity
• recency
• cached popularity rows

The goal is to keep recommendations fast, explainable, and useful without depending on an external recommendation service.

SQLite caching

Anime metadata is cached locally with TTL-based freshness rules.

That gives:

• fast startup
• quick search and browsing
• offline-friendly behavior for cached content

Modern terminal support

On supported terminals, ani-tui can render real cover art using terminal image protocols.

Where that is not stable or not available, it falls back to a half-block renderer so the UI stays consistent.

Integrated watch history

Episodes are marked as watched as you play them, and progress persists across sessions.

That makes resume behavior feel natural the next time you open the app.

The stack

• UI: Ratatui
• Runtime: Rust + Tokio
• Storage: SQLite
• Playback engine: ani-cli (via subprocess orchestration)
• Metadata source: AniList GraphQL

Installation

It is available on crates.io:

cargo install ani-tui-app

Then run:

ani-tui

ani-cli is still required at runtime, along with a supported player (mpv, iina, or vlc).

Feedback welcome

I would love feedback from other ani-cli users.

In particular, I would be interested in:

• better subprocess-management patterns for ani-cli
• flags or playback options that would be useful to expose in TUI settings
• terminal compatibility feedback, especially around image rendering

GitHub: logando-al/ani-tui

If there is interest, I can also share more implementation details about the local caching and recommendation heuristics.