Crossword and Crosstui

This is an experimental project for solving crosswords in the terminal. I built it mainly because I wanted to build something fun with Ratatui, a library for TUIs (user interfaces that run in the terminal).

If you like crosswords and running things in the terminal, please give it a try!

To play a crossword

First, find a .puz file. Many crossword sites allow you to download puzzles in this format, such as https://crosshare.org/ or https://crosswordfiend.com/download/. Or, use one of the examples in this repo, in crossword/puzzles/.

Then, run the crosstui binary, passing the path to the .puz file as an argument:

cargo run --release --bin=crosstui -- /path/to/your/crossword.puz

Code organization

The code is separated into two crates.

The crossword crate understands .puz files and how crossword puzzles work, but has no UI. Its primary type is the Puzzle struct, and it should be possible to build a separate crossword app using a different UI framework, by depending on crossword only.

The crosstui crate is the interactive UI for displaying and solving puzzles, which uses the crossword crate to model the puzzle, and Ratatui for the UI.