Ratatui maintainer unveils Ratty, live 3D model previews in terminal

Orhun Parmaksız turned the terminal into a place where 3D models can actually move. His new Ratty project from the Ratatui maintainer is a Rust-built terminal emulator that promises live model previews, spinning rat cursor graphics, and inline 3D objects without forcing you out of the shell.

The GitHub README called Ratty “a next-gen terminal emulator for all the terminal rats,” and the demo file in the repository was named Peek.2026-04-26.20-57.mp4, a fitting tease for a project still marked as under construction. Even in that state, the repo snapshot showed real momentum: 97 stars, 4 forks, and 54 commits, enough to signal that Rust developers were already paying attention.

Ratty’s pitch is not just visual novelty. The README lists 2D and 3D terminal presentation modes, inline 3D object support through a custom Ratty Graphics Protocol, image support via the Kitty Graphics Protocol, and GPU-backed text rendering with Ratatui plus Parley and Vello. The protocol docs go further, defining RGP as a way to insert 3D objects as first-class inline terminal objects, anchored to terminal cells instead of floating like a separate app window. For Rust builders who live in terminals, that matters. It means you can imagine inspecting an asset, previewing a model, or prototyping terminal tooling with real spatial content in place, not as a screenshot or an external viewer.

The current rendering stack is a mixed pipeline, and that is where the honesty in the project matters. Ratty uses Ratatui for the UI buffer, parley_ratatui for text shaping and rendering, and Bevy for scene presentation. Parley and Vello render on the GPU, but the Bevy side still relies on a readback bridge rather than a fully GPU-resident shared-texture path. In other words, the engine is already clever, but it is not pretending to be finished.

The source tree backs that up. Files such as inline.rs, model.rs, mouse.rs, rendering.rs, rgp.rs, runtime.rs, scene.rs, and terminal.rs point to active work on inline object demos, GLB file support, mouse drawing, and a lazy-initialized off-screen GPU path. That is the kind of detail that separates a toy from a real terminal graphics experiment. When the project wants to show off, it can; when it wants to become infrastructure, the plumbing is already visible.

Parmaksız himself brings weight to the announcement. His GitHub profile identifies him as “Terminal Chef at @ratatui” and a maintainer at Arch Linux, with Ankara, Turkey listed as his location. Ratatui itself has grown into a major Rust TUI library with about 20.1k stars, and Parmaksız has previously traced its rise from a fork of tui-rs in February 2023 to the first Ratatui release in March 2023. That history is why Ratty lands as more than a gimmick. It feels like the next test of how much harder a terminal can work before a GUI finally takes over.