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rustamp | updates
Jan 20, 2026


I started by giving rustamp a Death Stranding-inspired HUD in Iced. The look
stuck: mono typography, amber tags, cyan highlights, and layered panels. After
the first iteration, it was obvious this shouldn't be a one-off. I wanted to
reuse the same components in other Rust apps without copy-pasting UI glue
everywhere.

So I split the HUD pieces into a small crate, rustamp-iced-ui, and wired
rustamp-iced to consume it as an external path dependency. The result is a
reusable set of components with the same visual language, plus fewer lifetime
gymnastics in the app layer.
What changed

Added rustamp-iced-ui with a HudTheme palette and a handful of reusable
components.
Refactored the Iced view to consume those components instead of inline
styling.
Matched the Ratatui layout to the same HUD vibe, so the terminal UI doesn't
feel like a second-class citizen.
Split rustamp-iced-ui into its own repo and referenced it via a path
dependency.

The components
The crate is intentionally small: a theme struct and a few building blocks.

HudTheme: mono font + palette + a tiny alpha helper.
panel_style, header_style: style closures for consistent panels.
divider: a thin rule with the right border color.
tag, header_bar, status_bar_text: common HUD structures.

That is enough to build a DS-style surface without embedding styling logic
in every view function.
Why the API looks the way it does
Iced's style closures and widget builders can be picky about lifetimes.
Instead of pushing those constraints into the app, the component helpers
take a HudTheme by value. HudTheme is Copy-friendly, and that
sidesteps a lot of lifetime noise when composing UI.
Example usage in the app layer:
use rustamp_iced_ui::{components as hud, HudTheme};

let theme = HudTheme::default();

let header = hud::header_bar(
    theme,
    header_left.into(),
    header_right.into(),
);

let status = hud::status_bar_text(theme, help_text, right_text);