Layout & UI

Rune’s screen is one main output viewport with docks above and below. Docks hold bars (single-line, script-rendered), panes (multi-line output buffers), and the built-in components input, status, and separator. You declare the arrangement once:

rune.ui.layout({
    top    = { { name = "chat", height = 10 } },  -- a pane, 10 lines tall
    bottom = { "input", "separator", "status" },  -- input, a rule, the status bar
})

Reading that: a chat pane docked on top; at the bottom, the input line, a separator rule, and the status bar below it.

┌─────────────────────────────┐
│ chat pane (10 lines)        │  top dock
├─────────────────────────────┤
│                             │
│ main output viewport        │
│                             │
├─────────────────────────────┤
│ > input line                │  bottom dock
│ ─────────────────────────── │
│ status bar                  │
└─────────────────────────────┘

Rules of the layout table

• Entries are component names: a bar name, a pane name, or the built-ins "input", "status", "separator". A table entry ({ name = ..., height = n }) sets an explicit height in lines (a pane spends two of those on its header and bottom border).
• rune.ui.layout replaces the whole layout. Always include the bottom dock with "input", because nothing re-adds the input line if you leave it out.
• Unknown names are skipped; hidden panes and empty bars take no space.
• A bar or pane renders only if a dock names it. Registering a renderer or writing to a pane is not enough — the layout decides what appears.
• The default layout is bottom = { "input", "status" }. You only need rune.ui.layout to change it.

The pieces

• Bars: you write a render function, and rune calls it with the current width every 250ms. The built-in status bar is one of these.
• Panes: named buffers that show their most recent lines. Write to them from triggers; toggle them from binds.
• Pickers: fuzzy overlays for commands, worlds, and anything your scripts want to offer.

The quake console recipe combines all of this in one short script.

Reactive state

Bars usually render from rune.state, a read-only table the client keeps current: connected, address, scroll_mode, scroll_lines, width, height. When your own state changes and a bar should reflect it now, call rune.ui.refresh_bars().

Related: rune.ui reference, Bars, Panes, Pickers