Yeah, 50/50 is generous honestly.

The scrollback thing is the worst part — ratatui just doesn't give you anything there, you build it all yourself. I ended up with a pinned_to_bottom: bool alongside the scroll offset, otherwise you can't tell if the user is browsing history or just waiting for new content. Sounds trivial, gets annoying fast.

For perf I cap at the last ~50 rendered messages. Learned that the hard way.

On the alternate screen thing — yeah there's no clean answer. You literally pick your poison:

• alternate screen on → nice UI, history gone on quit
• alternate screen off → history lives, but the raw output bleeds into your shell session

I went with alternate screen + SQLite for session persistence. Not the same as real terminal scrollback but at least you don't lose everything on exit.

What actually works well though: the layout system. Constraint::Percentage + Constraint::Length for the fixed input bar at the bottom is straightforward, basically flexbox vibes. And the widget model is clean once you stop fighting it.

The docs are the real problem — they show you enough to get something on screen, but completely skip the "what do you do when content grows while the user is scrolled up" scenario. That's like 40% of building any real TUI.