January 28, 2026
Tiny screens, huge opinions
Mousefood – Build embedded terminal UIs for microcontrollers
Terminal apps on tiny gadgets — Rust fans hype, Pico and CYD crews flood the comments
TLDR: Mousefood lets you run retro-style text interfaces on tiny boards like the Pico and ESP32, complete with readable fonts, themes, and even e‑ink support. Comments erupted with hype, hardware questions (Pico and CYD), and debates over async support—proof this could make tiny gadgets feel like tiny computers.
Mousefood just dropped, and the maker crowd is acting like someone strapped a retro computer to a matchbox. It’s a new way to run old-school, text-style apps (think menus and dashboards made of characters) on tiny chips like the Raspberry Pi Pico and ESP32—no full operating system needed. The devs bragged about bigger fonts for those fancy box-drawing characters, bold/italic options, and even built-in color themes (yes, someone said “Tokyo Night on a 2-inch screen”). There’s even talk of e‑ink support. If you want to peek, it’s all on GitHub.
The comments are where it explodes. One fan basically declared a life pivot—“aaaaand this how I learn rust”—while another flexed that it already “works on ESP32, RPi2040, and STM32,” setting off a wave of “will it run on my thing?” posts. The “Cheap Yellow Display” faithful crashed the thread demanding answers, while Pico 2 folks begged for shopping lists. Meanwhile, the async crowd stirred the pot asking if it plays nice with Embassy (a popular “do two things at once” style for tiny chips), prompting a soft split between “keep it simple, serial” and “I want the future on a postage stamp.” Font nerds piled in too: go big with Unicode for pretty borders or go tiny with IBM437 to save space. Verdict: it’s a hit—and a hardware shopping spree has begun.
Key Points
- •Mousefood is a no-std embedded-graphics backend for Ratatui to build terminal UIs on microcontrollers.
- •It provides broader glyph coverage by default via embedded-graphics-unicodefonts, with ibm437 as a smaller alternative when disabling font features.
- •Bold and italic fonts are supported through EmbeddedBackendConfig, with all fonts required to be the same size and regular font as fallback.
- •Color themes can be customized via ColorTheme, with built-in themes including ANSI (default) and Tokyo Night.
- •Mousefood supports simulation via embedded-graphics-simulator and offers EPD integration for WeAct Studio e-ink displays through the epd-weact feature and driver configuration.