But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them, I don't know what it is yet but surely someone is working on this.
TUIs look good to look at though!
dogas 31 minutes ago [-]
I've been making a modern Slack terminal client (https://github.com/gammons/slk) and it's been a joy to use daily. There are a few things that IMO have unlocked a fantastic TUI experience:
- TUI libraries like Lipgloss and Bubbletea really allow users to build a rich experience nowadays. Really anything from https://charm.land is well-polished and a joy to use.
- Kitty image format works great and allows for Avatars, image previews, etc, which helps immensely make slk feel like a Slack client and not an IRC client.
oDot 2 hours ago [-]
Yep, that's about it. I am making a TUI for non-techies, packing it with Ghostty, and sending it to non-techies to use:
Soooo... lib ghostty supports the kitty (but not sixel) terminal image format.
schonfinkel 49 minutes ago [-]
> But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them
I like this new TUI renaissance as well, but if you wanna see what a symbiotic relationship between GUIs x TUIs could look like you need to see what Emacs does with Orgmode and the whole Org ecosystem of org-agenda, org-roam, etc. Lot's of these TUIs from the awesome are somewhat already inside Emacs.
I agree. The only reason I use TUI is because GUI are very slow with electron.
The only software that is as fast as TUI is the Zed IDE. Apparently they use Rust + their own built GUI toolkit with GPU rendering.
And apparently it's tightly coupled with Zed.
2 hours ago [-]
rickyvetter 11 minutes ago [-]
I work on bonsai_term (though Jose is the primary author and many others have contributed incredible work). I'm happy to try and answer any questions that the post may bring up.
knuckleheads 4 hours ago [-]
I have had a similar notion, around the same time, with tui's and strace in particular. Lots of experiments, never quite good enough to publish or try to popularize. Something I've found in the last few years though, and especially the last six months, is that the impulse to make a better tui has died for me. Claude et al are going to wield these tools via cli far better than I can via tui. The built in visualization is nice for sure in tui, an embodied perspective on how to investigate something, however Claude can make a custom one for me in the moment within a few minutes. My impulse is to throw Claude at the issue with the bare linux toolbox while I do other things, not hand craft better tools that I don't have much motivation to use right now.
bedstefar 3 hours ago [-]
I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking.
Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that.
Now, I get that a TUI can look incredibly crisp with proper text rendering, kerning, ligatures, nerd fonts and so on, but still with all that, at the end of the day we still have a thingamajig that implements a VT100. It is a strict subset of what could potentially be drawn with a proper GUI framework.
I understand that TUIs can run over SSH channels, can be juggled with Zellij/tmux/mprocs -- as such they are composable in the sense that they can be used in a way the author(s) didn't think of. It's been a while since I've done any of that personally, and I for one think it's a bit of a cop-out that the Claude Code integration in PyCharm is just the TUI [1] inside a terminal emulator inside my IDE when it could be so much more, just to provide one example.
The article shows off an strace TUI, and it's not like I can't see the benefits of making strace output more browsable. What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.
So what is the appeal? I'm asking in good faith. Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks? Is it the multi-platform aspect?
If all we work in are these super-lean TUIs maybe we don't even need so powerful computers or such high-DPI displays anymore?
I'm genuinely puzzled, but interested to know how TUIs appeal to other people.
1) which, I understand, is itself a React app with a console renderer!
barnabee 48 minutes ago [-]
My take is that GUI frameworks/APIs have abandoned power users.
Yes, there are things like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this.
Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially for someone who remembers adding a couple of libraries to a Delphi project back in the Office 2000s era and getting full docking, configurable toolbars, etc. with little to no work.
So the easy fallback (especially with the recent proliferation of libraries) is TUI and CLI applications with the layout/docking and tabs provided by the terminal emulator itself or one of tmux/zellij/etc.
I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.
death916 19 minutes ago [-]
WaveTerminal which I use on and off is sort of a graphical terminal like that. Has gui widgets that tile inside the terminal doing alot of the things you might open another pane for IE:file manager resources etc.
Probably not as extensive as you mean but its sort of a stepping stone.
- Allowing me to customize the presentation according to my preferences
- Not having to leave my terminal, where I spend most of my time (I do realize this is something of a chicken-and-egg situation)
geocar 2 hours ago [-]
> as such they are composable in the sense that they can be used in a way the author(s) didn't think of. It's been a while since I've done any of that personally,
I do this all the time.
One of my favourite applications is a tool called "autoexpect" and I use it every time I try a new program.
What it does is this: I run a program in it's virtual terminal, and it writes a TCL script that does what I did, and puts little regex tests in for the output of that program for me. I can then edit that program (or not: sometimes the first output is fine).
Once upon a time I used to use a program called DESQview: It had a "learn" feature that allowed you to record and playback even DOS programs, so it was very easy to pick up autoexpect.
DESQview/X was their X11 server, and it also had the "learn" feature, but unless the application could be driven entirely by the keyboard, it didn't work; most similar applications I've seen over the decades since need such care for reliable "scripts".
Yes sometimes you also have the possibility of using the GUI accessibility framework to "script" the app. This is barely ok if it works, but most GUIs that I want to script were designed so that would not work at all, and it is coding that requires me work with the app instead of asking a domain expert for a recording.
autoexpect on the other hand is just text, easy to read and modify, and easy to send by email. It is hard to make a terminal application hostile to autoexpect without a great deal of work that (in the text based environment) can usually be undone just by using tmux and mosh on loopback.
> What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.
Modern (as in, since the 1980s) terminals are very capable of multiple fonts and font-sizes. I usually use a non-proportional font for coding myself.
bedstefar 1 hours ago [-]
> Modern (as in, since the 1980s) terminals are very capable of multiple fonts and font-sizes. I usually use a non-proportional font for coding myself.
Is that really true? Can I, in one terminal window, have prose with a serif font and code with a monospaced font at the same time? If I hover over something with my mouse, can I have a TUI tooltip at a smaller font size?
geocar 1 hours ago [-]
Yes such-a-thing-is-possible: The DEC VT330 (for example) allowed font upload, had multiple font sizes, and even mouse support.
There once was a program called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR which appears at first blush to be some kind of X11-competitor, except it was using the VT330's regular terminal capabilities to do those fancy pixel-patterns and fonts, and so there's just some weird VT escape sequences you've never heard of in there.
You can also use SIXELs if you want even more control, and you can readily see such things in action because qemu can (in 2026) send its graphical VGA display into a sixel terminal, but in the 1980s such a thing would not have been performant (probably something like 3 frames per minute) because the VT330 was slow, and such a thing would not be popular you would "lose the text" at some layer which would be as inconvenient as using any other graphical application.
gchamonlive 2 hours ago [-]
To me they are much better than browser/electron/native gui because they are light on resources, very predictable, portable and honestly they get the job done. I used k8s Lens and it gave the impression of being efficient because of the high density of information, but I haven't felt like I downgraded when I moved to k9s, and now I can manage my clusters, develop their charts using neovim and browse the web without getting dangerously close to filling 16GB of ram. Before with Lens, Pycharm and a browser that would swallow the ram whole and spit its decaying bones to the swap unreasonably often.
citrin_ru 2 hours ago [-]
TUI returns what GUI lost over the last decades - low latency, low RAM/CPU usage, ability to navigate without a mouse. No one seems to be building nice GUI apps anymore.
fuzzy2 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, they often lack what we gained over the last decades. Namely navigating with a mouse and being self-explanatory and same-y.
The latter is mostly because certain GUI patterns simply cannot be implemented with a TUI.
And then everyone has their own idea of what keyboard shortcuts should be like. Yuck
citrin_ru 35 minutes ago [-]
IMHO peak GUI was in 2000s - on Windows most app used Win32 API and apps which followed "Microsoft Windows User Experience" guide had consistent UI/UX. Since then Microsoft introduced many competing frameworks to create GUI all look slightly different and UX is less consistent too. And then Electron come which brought inconsistency of web to the desktop apps.
coldtea 1 hours ago [-]
>Unfortunately, they often lack what we gained over the last decades. Namely navigating with a mouse
For those workflows (as opposed, to say, Photoshop), we could do without that. That's the whole benefit.
>and being self-explanatory and same-y.
GUIs are quite less same-y that TUI. Not to mention the same app GUI can be widely different between 2010 and 2026, whereas any TUIs from 1990s I still use look and work the same.
aacid 2 hours ago [-]
You've answered yourself if fourth paragraph. For me (and guessing for many other engineers) usability is more important than crisp visuals..
I personally prefer same font (one I choose) everywhere opposed to "whichever font developer likes for his app).
TUI apps are quick, efficient, portable and usable through ssh. If crisp graphics is the only downside I really don't mind.
bedstefar 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but as far as I'm aware you get to pick one font and one size as long as the UI is laid out with literal ASCII spaces and newlines. You can't have tooltips with a smaller font, or code and prose together with monospaced/serif fonts accordingly.
davidcann 1 hours ago [-]
You can also sandbox TUIs, with full control of the sandbox parameters. To do this on macOS, you can use: https://multitui.com
theblazehen 3 hours ago [-]
For me personally, it's because it retains the same window position, and I get back what I had before when it closes. If GUIs worked more like they did with windows in plan9, I'd definitely use them more
zokier 2 hours ago [-]
> Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks?
Yeah, I think that is 90% of it. And the whole related ecosystem aspect. All the major ways of building GUIs suck right now, especially for tiny apps. And to further exacerbate the problem, GUI frameworks are generally tied to their programming languages, Qt is C++, SwiftUI is Swift, Flutter is Dart so on; spewing some terminal escapes to stdout is something that can done from basically any language with relative ease.
coldtea 1 hours ago [-]
>Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that.
Bypassing all that crap is the main benefit. I don't want any of that superfluous, and ever-changing stuff, when the terminal and, if needed, a TUI, is enough. As a bonus, it works everywhere I can ssh to.
>If all we work in are these super-lean TUIs maybe we don't even need so powerful computers or such high-DPI displays anymore?
For a lot of stuff, you never needed it. For others, like an IDE, DTP, gaming, 3D modelling, video editing, photo editing, they're amazing.
imjonse 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
haeseong 4 hours ago [-]
The deeper reason agents write good Bonsai_term code is that the entire UI renders as plain text, so a screenshot test is just a diff the model can read and verify on its own. A GUI's visual state needs a vision model to inspect, but a TUI's output already lives in the agent's native modality, which closes the feedback loop for free.
nsonha 3 hours ago [-]
for snapshot tests it seems better to diff a data representation such as some yaml string, than to diff UIs
rickyvetter 18 minutes ago [-]
The whole UI seems better for LLMs to consume and also displays nicely in-editor for humans. Test failures become failing screenshot tests essentially, which are really comfortable changes to review.
Natalia724 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
laidoffamazon 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Balinares 4 hours ago [-]
They (correctly IMO) seem to think that the hard thing in sourcing the top candidates by the sort of metric they care about, is getting them to even know about you as a potential employer. That means figuring out where those candidates might be and finding ways to get your name in front of their eyeballs.
So, cool nerdy blog posts on HN, cool nerdy puzzles on Cracking the Cryptic, etc.
Having been sorta involved in hiring in the same sorta market, I can respect how astute their approach is.
Rendered at 10:45:37 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
There are other great examples of TUIs that i've seen around the web:
https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui
https://terminaltrove.com/explore/
https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them, I don't know what it is yet but surely someone is working on this.
TUIs look good to look at though!
- TUI libraries like Lipgloss and Bubbletea really allow users to build a rich experience nowadays. Really anything from https://charm.land is well-polished and a joy to use.
- Kitty image format works great and allows for Avatars, image previews, etc, which helps immensely make slk feel like a Slack client and not an IRC client.
https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley
I like this new TUI renaissance as well, but if you wanna see what a symbiotic relationship between GUIs x TUIs could look like you need to see what Emacs does with Orgmode and the whole Org ecosystem of org-agenda, org-roam, etc. Lot's of these TUIs from the awesome are somewhat already inside Emacs.
https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/manual/Agenda-Views.html
The only software that is as fast as TUI is the Zed IDE. Apparently they use Rust + their own built GUI toolkit with GPU rendering.
And apparently it's tightly coupled with Zed.
Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that.
Now, I get that a TUI can look incredibly crisp with proper text rendering, kerning, ligatures, nerd fonts and so on, but still with all that, at the end of the day we still have a thingamajig that implements a VT100. It is a strict subset of what could potentially be drawn with a proper GUI framework.
I understand that TUIs can run over SSH channels, can be juggled with Zellij/tmux/mprocs -- as such they are composable in the sense that they can be used in a way the author(s) didn't think of. It's been a while since I've done any of that personally, and I for one think it's a bit of a cop-out that the Claude Code integration in PyCharm is just the TUI [1] inside a terminal emulator inside my IDE when it could be so much more, just to provide one example.
The article shows off an strace TUI, and it's not like I can't see the benefits of making strace output more browsable. What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.
So what is the appeal? I'm asking in good faith. Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks? Is it the multi-platform aspect?
If all we work in are these super-lean TUIs maybe we don't even need so powerful computers or such high-DPI displays anymore?
I'm genuinely puzzled, but interested to know how TUIs appeal to other people.
1) which, I understand, is itself a React app with a console renderer!
Yes, there are things like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this.
Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially for someone who remembers adding a couple of libraries to a Delphi project back in the Office 2000s era and getting full docking, configurable toolbars, etc. with little to no work.
So the easy fallback (especially with the recent proliferation of libraries) is TUI and CLI applications with the layout/docking and tabs provided by the terminal emulator itself or one of tmux/zellij/etc.
I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.
https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm
- Optimizing for fast, keyboard-only usage
- Allowing me to customize the presentation according to my preferences
- Not having to leave my terminal, where I spend most of my time (I do realize this is something of a chicken-and-egg situation)
I do this all the time.
One of my favourite applications is a tool called "autoexpect" and I use it every time I try a new program.
What it does is this: I run a program in it's virtual terminal, and it writes a TCL script that does what I did, and puts little regex tests in for the output of that program for me. I can then edit that program (or not: sometimes the first output is fine).
Once upon a time I used to use a program called DESQview: It had a "learn" feature that allowed you to record and playback even DOS programs, so it was very easy to pick up autoexpect.
DESQview/X was their X11 server, and it also had the "learn" feature, but unless the application could be driven entirely by the keyboard, it didn't work; most similar applications I've seen over the decades since need such care for reliable "scripts".
Yes sometimes you also have the possibility of using the GUI accessibility framework to "script" the app. This is barely ok if it works, but most GUIs that I want to script were designed so that would not work at all, and it is coding that requires me work with the app instead of asking a domain expert for a recording.
autoexpect on the other hand is just text, easy to read and modify, and easy to send by email. It is hard to make a terminal application hostile to autoexpect without a great deal of work that (in the text based environment) can usually be undone just by using tmux and mosh on loopback.
> What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.
Modern (as in, since the 1980s) terminals are very capable of multiple fonts and font-sizes. I usually use a non-proportional font for coding myself.
Is that really true? Can I, in one terminal window, have prose with a serif font and code with a monospaced font at the same time? If I hover over something with my mouse, can I have a TUI tooltip at a smaller font size?
There once was a program called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR which appears at first blush to be some kind of X11-competitor, except it was using the VT330's regular terminal capabilities to do those fancy pixel-patterns and fonts, and so there's just some weird VT escape sequences you've never heard of in there.
You can also use SIXELs if you want even more control, and you can readily see such things in action because qemu can (in 2026) send its graphical VGA display into a sixel terminal, but in the 1980s such a thing would not have been performant (probably something like 3 frames per minute) because the VT330 was slow, and such a thing would not be popular you would "lose the text" at some layer which would be as inconvenient as using any other graphical application.
The latter is mostly because certain GUI patterns simply cannot be implemented with a TUI.
And then everyone has their own idea of what keyboard shortcuts should be like. Yuck
For those workflows (as opposed, to say, Photoshop), we could do without that. That's the whole benefit.
>and being self-explanatory and same-y.
GUIs are quite less same-y that TUI. Not to mention the same app GUI can be widely different between 2010 and 2026, whereas any TUIs from 1990s I still use look and work the same.
I personally prefer same font (one I choose) everywhere opposed to "whichever font developer likes for his app).
TUI apps are quick, efficient, portable and usable through ssh. If crisp graphics is the only downside I really don't mind.
Yeah, I think that is 90% of it. And the whole related ecosystem aspect. All the major ways of building GUIs suck right now, especially for tiny apps. And to further exacerbate the problem, GUI frameworks are generally tied to their programming languages, Qt is C++, SwiftUI is Swift, Flutter is Dart so on; spewing some terminal escapes to stdout is something that can done from basically any language with relative ease.
Bypassing all that crap is the main benefit. I don't want any of that superfluous, and ever-changing stuff, when the terminal and, if needed, a TUI, is enough. As a bonus, it works everywhere I can ssh to.
>If all we work in are these super-lean TUIs maybe we don't even need so powerful computers or such high-DPI displays anymore?
For a lot of stuff, you never needed it. For others, like an IDE, DTP, gaming, 3D modelling, video editing, photo editing, they're amazing.
So, cool nerdy blog posts on HN, cool nerdy puzzles on Cracking the Cryptic, etc.
Having been sorta involved in hiring in the same sorta market, I can respect how astute their approach is.