If you're going to put a video demo on your main webpage, can it have play/pause and a control bar? So I can actually skip to a part I want to look at. Here's the actual video: https://tui.studio/screenshots/video.mp4.
Also, how does this handle terminal resizing? Are there options to anchor elements to the left/right etc, or will narrowing the terminal window just make everything fall off the side, or worse, all the text wraps?
This is nonsensical, there is nothing textual about the UIs being shown here. It doesn't stop being a GUI if you have a 1:1 representation of the concept within character cells.
The UX actually matters, and TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power (lazygit being an excellent example). But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.
> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.
Hard disagree. Borland TurboVision [0] was one of the greatest TUI toolkits of the DOS era, had all of these:
> Turbo Vision applications replicate the look and feel of these IDEs, including edit controls, list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and menus, all of which have built-in mouse support.
Oh man, Turbo Pascal was my first "real" programming language -- it was all various flavors of BASIC before, and mostly toy projects. The developer experience with Turbo Pascal (by which I guess I mostly mean Turbo Vision) was honestly pretty great
Vasellating. TurboVision was awesome, but it was pushing the boundary of TUI, which in my mind was great for moving hard copy to computer entered use case. To wit, hard copy on your right side, you transfer data to app without looking at screen, but just looking at hard copy, remembering when/where to hit return key, maybe tab for prior field, stuff like that.
But hey, if the screen is drawn 24 x 80 with extended ascii, it's TUI. And man, loved the "absolute" keyword in turbo pascal. Instant screen writes when writing to a 2 dimensional array.
It's a TUI if it uses text to build those elements.
You can be effective and powerful in any kind of interface, Just like you can be ineffective and weak in any kind of interface. People like TUIs because they're cool, and work over SSH.
Yes.
A TUI runs in a text session.
A GUI runs in a graphics session.
A terminal emulator emulates a text session in a graphics session - and allows you to run TUI/CLI tools.
This is apparently controversial?
> there is nothing textual about the UIs being shown here.
Well, except:
> a 1:1 representation of the concept within character cells.
TUI is build from text, and living within its constraints and what it's engine (usually the terminal) allows. GUI is build from graphics, and has basically a pixel perfect control of its own. This is a very notable difference, especially at the time when these terms were coined.
> TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power
No, this is a result of different architectures and their constraints.
> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you
TUI and mouse are predating the GUI (more or less). We had them already 40-50 years ago at the dawn of interfaces. We are now just moving back to them for practical reasons.
The UIs are text only, so they are textual. Modern TUIs may support mouse events. That this tool can export to several TUI frameworks is evidence that these UIs are indeed TUIs, even if not the most traditional.
Zellij among is a great example, I can do everything with my keyboard, but every now and them I'm already with the mouse and just click a tab or pane, no functionality lost, just added, why the need to make a cutoff philosophical/semantic hard argument?
That's fair... I feel that way about GUIs too in general though. Everything should be keyboard navigable and reasonable control flows. Tab and arrows, etc. Should be able to control focus and selection (enter).
I admit I don't always pay the most attention to it, as the UI components I tend to use do a good enough job of this. But I'm usually pretty consistent with it.
Would you make the same argument for classic UIs created with things like Borland's Turbo Vision framework? It's generally known as a TUI framework (including by Wikipedia).
You can tunnel a port over SSH and get a web UI locally, though it's not commonly done. I feel like more people would actually do this if tunneling a port was just ever so slightly easier (like, you're already SSH'd into a box, then you run a command, then you somehow automatically get a tunnel for that command's UI port plus a local browser window open to the page)
Good insight, but if you discount the visual elements (tabs, buttons, etc), you're limiting TUI to CLI, and I think that's unwarranted. The value proposition of both TUI and GUI is two-fold: you see the available action options, and you see the effect of your actions. So, yes, TUI and GUI _are_ closely related: who cares whether we're displaying pixels or character blocks.
Unfortunately, they are often artificially differentiated by the style of the UX interaction: TUIs promote the keyboard actions, and GUIs prefer mouse without corresponding keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately for GUIs, their designers are often so enamored with WIMP that they omit the keyboard shortcuts or make them awkward. I hate it when, even if the ACTION button is available by keyboard traversal at all, it requires some unknown number of widget traversals instead of being one tab away.
Since the keyboard is almost always used for the textual data, it makes sense to me to always enable it for command execution. Well designed GUIs and TUIs provide both WIMP and keyboard UX, which sadly is not the norm today, so here's my vote to make them larp for each other more.
> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.
TIL that VIM is not cease being TUI the moment I type :set mouse=a.
Hot taking, LARPing and teenage angst (caused by generational gap with those has been using TUI since 1980s) is on your side.
lazygit supports vim style keybindings and mouse click and scroll. I mostly use the key shortcuts but sometimes the mouse is useful. But i agree that a well thought out state machine that can be navigated through via keyboard is a dream to work with. Lazygit is superb. But this is not a distinction between TUI and GUI.
You might not like this type of interface, but it is hardly "nonsensical". In the 1990s this sort of text-based GUI was common in DOS programs, such as Borland's "Turbo" languages and the original pre-Windows FoxPro.
I've been working with notcurses recently and it is a full TUI that handles mouse events just fine. Runs over slow SSH connections and everything. The nice part is that you can fully operate applications built on top of it with the keyboard if you so choose, the mouse is just a shortcut.
Sadly the project is not really in a usable state at the moment. The documentation is incomplete riddled with errors, the code has some pretty glaring bugs, and it's close to abandoned. It's a shame because you can do some really amazing stuff with it.
People don't build TUIs because they want to run apps in the terminal, they build them because the terminal happens to be the most portable app platform available.
My ancient boxed copy of Visual Basic for DOS 1.0 that supported mouse clicks on TUI buttons would have found your viewpoint quite offensive if it had any AI in it ;-) Oh boy, good old days.
Man, I've had so much frustrating just trying to copy & paste from inside a terminal running e.g. opencode or crush.
I think TUIs are neat, I guess. But I think these things have abused the concept extensively. They don't actually interact well with the rest of a Unix environment.
Drawing a “nonsense” line between TUIs and GUIs is pretty arbitrary, it’s all pixels on a screen at the end of the day. People like the TUI vibe, and that’s a good enough reason to make and use them.
I love TUIs but one main reason for that is that they're keyboard centric. If I have to use the mouse it kills it for me, if both work then it's fine. I hope that modern TUI makers keep this in mind. What's great about the keyboard centric is that with a few keystrokes/shortcuts it's very easy to do repeatable work and takes less energy than hunting boxes to click on with the mouse.
I really don't want my TUI's to look like GUI's rendered in low res. The appeal to me of a TUI is that it is built specifically to be a TUI, and that means eschewing complexity and detail, and favouring compact text.
That's literally what TUI's looked like starting from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s... You have a pointing device, might as well make use of it to enhance discoverability.
This seems really reductive. Some UI paradigms work better at 80x24 vs at 640x480 (never mind whatever resolutions we have access to today). Or rather, the 80x24 text grid is using more pixels than that, but everything is aligned to that lower resolution, and that fundamentally changes what makes sense to do. Floating windows that can be dragged around to arbitrary positions? Terrible for low-res; classic for higher res. Dividing lines that split the screen into panels, and can be moved around a row or column at a time with a keyboard shortcut? Pretty much the opposite (enthusiasts of "tiling WMs" might disagree).
They all have very different structure to what a typical GUI look like. E.g. a focus on condensing more information in few text cells, and usually not displaying anything extraneous, typically rarely using dialogs etc.
There are notable exceptions to that, sure, but as I noted that is exactly what I have no interest in.
This is why I don't like TUIs at all, they're really bad at displaying complex information, handling complex interactions, and discovering how to compose those together.
> Design once, generate production-ready code for your framework of choice. Switch targets without touching your design. Alpha notice: Code export is not functional yet. We're actively working on it — check back soon.
In other words, it isn't at all usable right now. You can't produce a TUI with it, not even a limited one.
Better get ready for almost all software to use AI assistance in its creation.
You can build great things using AI agents, and you can build trash.
Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.
Way to read something into what I have never even wrote and try to spin it as something ideological. This is not "AI-assisted", it's completely vibe-coded by AI and the software doesn't even make sense since you can't export anything. It's just low-quality trash dumped on Hacker News and I'd argue this is not the place for it.
Not gonna like, I am having to actively fight the aversion I feel when reading something was "all written by claude", it is so hard to check if it was properly done or pure garbage, I don't even take the time to check.
I know this position is wrong, but it feels hard to spend my time on something that someone else might not have spent the time to create
It's not anything though. It's a website and electron app that promises functionality that completely isn't there. It's useless, but instead of being art, it promises functionality, so it's functionally trash.
I too remember running `rails new MyGreatApp` and having hoop dreams of being the next billionaire entrepreneur, but a boilerplate app is a boilerplate app.
Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.
Opinions do not win by "high score". Asserting the validity of opinions based on how widely they are held is dumb.
If 30% of devs love openclaw, I'm not re-examining my informed opinion, I am forming a new one about that 30% cohort.
Ignore the haters, sure. But don't ignore the well argumented criticism that you're getting from an overwhelming majority of your peers, as it's happening right now.
>can't wait to see where it goes!
Fall into this toxic positivity nonsense at your own peril.
Funny how you can tell a project is vibe-coded just from a first glance at its website. All these websites seem to somehow have the same visual style. Anyone noticed this?
Yep, my fans started revving as soon as I loaded it. Animations are out of control on the normal web as it is, but genAI sites take it to another level.
TUIs are very in right now. Nostalgia/vintage-computin-aesthetics & guru-gatekeeping around command line savviness are front and centre in the HN-and-adjacent mindshare.
I think it's AI tools, they are often done as tuis, they work well with text, the cli is a text processing god that is easy to extend with cli utilities, and since you find yourself in the terminal much nicer having TUIs quickly available, editor, git client, etc. I love the shift to the terminal as I use it a lot anyways (I'm old), but the missing piece for me is having a good sql tui client that does at least some of what data grip does. So I'm building my own as an experiment into agentic coding something from scratch (which I think what this TUI Studio is also). Surprised how good it is but also surprised how much time it takes to get things polished.
I agree. The animation on the site lost me when it placed a button. IMO, buttons are not part of TUIs. Those are just low-resolution GUIs, IMO, and that’s sort of the worst of all worlds. The first good TUIs were things like top and elm.
ENSHT comes for everyone. This is sexual selection over natural selection. Claude Code also gets this wrong, they got way to fancy and ruined what a good tui is by being an uncanny combo between a scrolling log and a completely rewritten canvas.
Apparently we now write desktop applications intended for designing the UI of other desktop applications, in TypeScript that runs in a Docker container, using a bunch of web frameworks (including for CSS) and self-hosting an nginx server?
I would have expected a TUI editor to be itself a TUI.
A number of years ago I hacked together something conceptually similar [1]. It was for design and demonstration of CLI tooling (not TUI). It used its own DSL which included command definitions and demo output for invocations.
It created a replica CLI that behaved the way the real thing would, for quick prototyping and design feedback. The next step [2] would have been generating backend for different languages/libraries to create the actual CLI.
I lost the original sample "buddy" files but we did use it for prototyping a new Chef Workstation cli. Copies still haunt the Internet [3]
This looks really cool. However, the current AI models are pretty good at designing UIs from prompts and even turning screenshots of mocks into full UIs. I'm not sure this visual design approach would save time vs simply prompting an AI agent.
That being said, I could see a niche market for a designer persona who is used to building in tools like figma.
also, this assumes humans are still the primary CLI consumers. With agents increasingly being the first-class users of command-line tools, building visual design tooling for terminal UIs feels like optimizing for a shrinking audience.
The TUI hype seems like nostalgia for COBOL mainframe apps that most people have never even used. A sort of secondhand cyberpunk role play with zero focus on actual UX.
Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
Have you ever watched someone USE those COBOL TUIs? Everyone from airline ticket agents, to local governments, to folks at Home Depot while looking up inventory. They could fly through menus and accomplish things. I remember when Best Buy switched to a Windows-based experience. It was terrible. Simply adding a mouse+windowing experience slowed everything way down. I saw it first hand at Target too. They went from an OS/2-based TUI to Windows NT. I know there'll always be those folks that think we're all just trying to play "leet Haxorz", but there's just something about those systems that people deeply connected with.
I personally think the opencode and kilo CLI have great UX, certainly better (and easier to use) than the web versions of both.
A lot of the recent TUI apps are really not old-school in any way. Not all apps need the feature-set of a browser engine. And compared to native mac/linux desktop apps, TUIs get cross-platform support by default.
> Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
Depending on how the TUI is made, it can be very visual, but lacks structure for a screen reader (unless you stay in the very simple "input field: value" kind of prompt, but even then auto completion is tricky).
Web browsers offer the DOM to tools such as screen readers (OSs offer their own accessibility sdks). Someday perhaps the TUI application could talk to the terminal emulator that would itself talk to the accessibility sdk of the OS and that info would somehow then be accessible.
There was a beginning of discussion at bubble tea[0] about this for example.
The interesting meta-pattern here is how often the tooling around a problem lags the problem itself by 5-10 years. The operational complexity exists, the pain is real, but because it's distributed across many small actors rather than concentrated in a few large ones, the market for structured solutions is slower to develop. That's usually a signal rather than a dead end — it means the first tool that actually fits the workflow, rather than a generic workflow tool, has real leverage.
This is a vibe coded app and isn't what I'd want but still, it's interesting to consider what a good implementation of "Figma for TUIs" could be, especially if it avoids the trap of simply treating the console as a crude raster instead of taking advantage of text and keyboards. IMO we don't need WIMP GUI shoved into terminal emulators.
Half surprised there's no raratui export with the other options. That said, probably lends itself more to Ink and @opentui/react. Also slightly disappointed at the lack of a direct Linux build for AppImage and/or Flathub. Also not using Github's releases which is a little curious.
On one hand this is a neat idea. I've thought about how nice it would be to have a visual layout tool for text-based designs. The current offerings are slim. Of course, you could easily argue that if you need a visual tool for it, you've gone too far; even the most sophisticated TUIs are still extremely simple.
On the other hand, for this work as they describe, it needs to be a complete UI framework across a bunch of languages and built on top of a bunch of existing frameworks. That seems... ambitious. Building one UI framework for one language is plenty hard enough.
What I find interesting about this is the second-order effect. The obvious first-order impact is well discussed, but the downstream implications for smaller players in the ecosystem usually take 6-12 months to materialize. That lag creates both risk and opportunity — the teams that model it early tend to be better positioned when the shift actually hits.
This is so cool I immediately wanted to convert my apps. But then when I thought about it, well it's trying to recreate CSS but in a majorly worse way.
Browsers are ubiquitous and I can just tell ai to build a web page.
I can't really see a use case other than novelty.
If you need a UI over SSH or inside tmux, skipping browsers and CSS isn't just a novelty, it's essential since HTML can't touch that territory. TS-based layout in terminals can be ugly but it also dodges a pile of accessibility, latency and bloat issues you get by default with anything running in Chrome.
In this age, rich TUI's feels wrong to me. Tools that expose a minimal web server with a lightweight UI is much more welcome than a complex TUI. But for most interactive terminal apps, it feels more natural when there is a single input at a time, like a wizard interface.
> No install fuss — download and start designing immediately.
also
> Gatekeeper blocks the app immediately. You'll see either "TUIStudio cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer" or "TUIStudio is damaged and can't be opened" on newer macOS after quarantine flags the binary.
To get past it: right-click the .app → Open → Open anyway — or go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway".
The biggest pain point with TUIs has always been the design iteration loop. You're basically writing code blind, running it, tweaking numbers, running again. It's like writing CSS without a browser preview.
Something like this could genuinely help for the layout/positioning phase, even if you still hand-write the interaction logic. The debate about whether these are "real TUIs" kind of misses the point imo. Textual and Ratatui already blur that line with mouse support and rich widgets. The ship sailed on pure keyboard-only text interfaces a while ago.
What I'd actually want from a tool like this is to export to multiple TUI frameworks. Right now you're locked into one ecosystem and the code export isn't even working yet, which makes the whole thing feel premature.
TUIs built today should be usable by AI agents. I'm not sure exactly what it looks like but I'm imagining that every UI view has an associated CLI command that can yield precisely that view. Maybe like formally structured breadcrumbs, or maybe like Emacs "keyboard macros".
I've found agents effective using GUI apps with nothing but the ability to take screenshots and send mouse and keyboard commands. I imagine they'd work even better with a TUI, even if it's not designed with agents in mind at all.
I'm not sure the utility of this kind of stuff anymore. It's relatively easy to sketch a layout on a napkin + prompt and then prompt claude code to use python textual as as TUI layer. I've had pretty good success with Textual+Claude so have a few colleagues. You could probably use Figma + claude etc as well.
I built something like this in 1993, it was used to design layouts for DOS apps and headers for printed listings. Imitating the BorlandPascal and Novel TUIs of the day
Claude Code built a TUI for me last night, in this case to step through nanosecond timestamped ITCH market data messages and rebuild an order book visual in the terminal. This type of stuff would have taken a day - but done in 5 minutes now.
I would be REALLY REALLY impressed if it manages to do this without bugs. Just using pythons textual can be very complex, belive it or not. Maaging not only to that but other frameworks too sounds insanely complex. I have a strong feeling this is vibecoded from the commit history?`
Ah yes, it says clearly that on the github page. Still, if its works, I am then impressed by the LLM.
Edit: It does, in fact, NOT work for code export. Level of impressiveness massively dropped.
Yeah, the website has many bugs too. Literally can't click on 50% of the "clickable" stuff. Not impressed by vibe coded nonsense. The comments here are weird, people are discussing the "idea" rather than the broken implementation.
Probably a bad omen of things to come for the internet.
Am I the only one who thinks the recent TUI explosion is absolutely not necessary?
I mean yes, code editor are great for this but a lot of the TUIs I see are so slow it begs the question why they exist to begin. CLIs are supposed to be remixable and scriptable.
I think a better architecture would be to generally keep CLIs work like CLIs and have separate processes that add terminal rendering functionalities for those that need / want it but in general it is an anti-pattern to start from this as default.
Depends highly on the specific application. Take a simple example of looking at process usage. You can use ps from the command line to get all sorts of info about a process. But there’s no substitute for top to show you an updating list of top cpu consumers, which ps just can’t do.
That's roughly aligned with my thinking. Make it a CLI. And if there's a lot of configuration that you can pass to it, have an option for rendering those options as a TUI.
Of course it's not necessary, it's a fashion. Choosing to make a TUI instead of a GUI is a fashion statement, it signals aesthetic alignment with nerdy shit and says the program isn't meant for common proles. There's pretty much nothing a TUI can do that a GUI can't do, while the opposite is very much not the case.
I wish HN had flairs (tags) like Reddit and mandated a few for AI-related work (AI-Assisted, AI-meta, AI-vibecoding) or something so these could be filtered out
I'm not sure that's a fair criticism. Many things require or benefit from something even more complex to make them (car -> factory, code -> IDE, text -> editor, food -> kitchen). I think the real debate here is that which is found in the other comments: do we want TUIs to look like GUIs?
The only reason I can think of is what I said before [0] given that the web was destroyed by the same web developers, then so was the desktop (with Electron) and now of all places terminals are now getting destroyed with infinite slop like this.
This nonsense will continue and accelerate until it reaches hardware.
If you're going to put a video demo on your main webpage, can it have play/pause and a control bar? So I can actually skip to a part I want to look at. Here's the actual video: https://tui.studio/screenshots/video.mp4.
Also, how does this handle terminal resizing? Are there options to anchor elements to the left/right etc, or will narrowing the terminal window just make everything fall off the side, or worse, all the text wraps?
You can right click on it and choose "Show controls", at least in Firefox.
Oh, that's odd, it didn't show up on chrome when I first tried it, but it does now. I was wondering how they'd managed to hide the video context menu
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This is nonsensical, there is nothing textual about the UIs being shown here. It doesn't stop being a GUI if you have a 1:1 representation of the concept within character cells.
The UX actually matters, and TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power (lazygit being an excellent example). But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.
> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.
Hard disagree. Borland TurboVision [0] was one of the greatest TUI toolkits of the DOS era, had all of these:
> Turbo Vision applications replicate the look and feel of these IDEs, including edit controls, list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and menus, all of which have built-in mouse support.
Well, I can’t remember if it had tabs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
Oh man, Turbo Pascal was my first "real" programming language -- it was all various flavors of BASIC before, and mostly toy projects. The developer experience with Turbo Pascal (by which I guess I mostly mean Turbo Vision) was honestly pretty great
Vasellating. TurboVision was awesome, but it was pushing the boundary of TUI, which in my mind was great for moving hard copy to computer entered use case. To wit, hard copy on your right side, you transfer data to app without looking at screen, but just looking at hard copy, remembering when/where to hit return key, maybe tab for prior field, stuff like that.
But hey, if the screen is drawn 24 x 80 with extended ascii, it's TUI. And man, loved the "absolute" keyword in turbo pascal. Instant screen writes when writing to a 2 dimensional array.
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It's a TUI if it uses text to build those elements.
You can be effective and powerful in any kind of interface, Just like you can be ineffective and weak in any kind of interface. People like TUIs because they're cool, and work over SSH.
Yes. A TUI runs in a text session. A GUI runs in a graphics session. A terminal emulator emulates a text session in a graphics session - and allows you to run TUI/CLI tools. This is apparently controversial?
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It's a TUI if it uses text to build those elements.
No. All you've done is make a low-resolution GUI.
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> there is nothing textual about the UIs being shown here.
Well, except:
> a 1:1 representation of the concept within character cells.
TUI is build from text, and living within its constraints and what it's engine (usually the terminal) allows. GUI is build from graphics, and has basically a pixel perfect control of its own. This is a very notable difference, especially at the time when these terms were coined.
> TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power
No, this is a result of different architectures and their constraints.
> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you
TUI and mouse are predating the GUI (more or less). We had them already 40-50 years ago at the dawn of interfaces. We are now just moving back to them for practical reasons.
The UIs are text only, so they are textual. Modern TUIs may support mouse events. That this tool can export to several TUI frameworks is evidence that these UIs are indeed TUIs, even if not the most traditional.
“Modern TUIs may support mouse events” hah! They already did in the 80s…
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No, a text-based UI is not sufficient. It must also work in a text-only session e.g., on the CLI over SSH.
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> That this tool can export to several TUI frameworks
It clearly cannot. Have you even tested it?
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I think your comment is nonsensical.
Zellij among is a great example, I can do everything with my keyboard, but every now and them I'm already with the mouse and just click a tab or pane, no functionality lost, just added, why the need to make a cutoff philosophical/semantic hard argument?
I like TUIs keyboard-centric. Mouse can be a plus, but it should never be necessary.
That's fair... I feel that way about GUIs too in general though. Everything should be keyboard navigable and reasonable control flows. Tab and arrows, etc. Should be able to control focus and selection (enter).
I admit I don't always pay the most attention to it, as the UI components I tend to use do a good enough job of this. But I'm usually pretty consistent with it.
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Would you make the same argument for classic UIs created with things like Borland's Turbo Vision framework? It's generally known as a TUI framework (including by Wikipedia).
One justification for TUIs is remote access over SSH.
You can tunnel a port over SSH and get a web UI locally, though it's not commonly done. I feel like more people would actually do this if tunneling a port was just ever so slightly easier (like, you're already SSH'd into a box, then you run a command, then you somehow automatically get a tunnel for that command's UI port plus a local browser window open to the page)
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Sure, but my point was that UX matters for TUIs. A TUI with a UX that fits its paradigm , again like lazygit, works great over SSH.
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Another justification could be simply some people like using them better.
Good insight, but if you discount the visual elements (tabs, buttons, etc), you're limiting TUI to CLI, and I think that's unwarranted. The value proposition of both TUI and GUI is two-fold: you see the available action options, and you see the effect of your actions. So, yes, TUI and GUI _are_ closely related: who cares whether we're displaying pixels or character blocks.
Unfortunately, they are often artificially differentiated by the style of the UX interaction: TUIs promote the keyboard actions, and GUIs prefer mouse without corresponding keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately for GUIs, their designers are often so enamored with WIMP that they omit the keyboard shortcuts or make them awkward. I hate it when, even if the ACTION button is available by keyboard traversal at all, it requires some unknown number of widget traversals instead of being one tab away.
Since the keyboard is almost always used for the textual data, it makes sense to me to always enable it for command execution. Well designed GUIs and TUIs provide both WIMP and keyboard UX, which sadly is not the norm today, so here's my vote to make them larp for each other more.
> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.
TIL that VIM is not cease being TUI the moment I type :set mouse=a.
Hot taking, LARPing and teenage angst (caused by generational gap with those has been using TUI since 1980s) is on your side.
lazygit supports vim style keybindings and mouse click and scroll. I mostly use the key shortcuts but sometimes the mouse is useful. But i agree that a well thought out state machine that can be navigated through via keyboard is a dream to work with. Lazygit is superb. But this is not a distinction between TUI and GUI.
You might not like this type of interface, but it is hardly "nonsensical". In the 1990s this sort of text-based GUI was common in DOS programs, such as Borland's "Turbo" languages and the original pre-Windows FoxPro.
I've been working with notcurses recently and it is a full TUI that handles mouse events just fine. Runs over slow SSH connections and everything. The nice part is that you can fully operate applications built on top of it with the keyboard if you so choose, the mouse is just a shortcut.
Sadly the project is not really in a usable state at the moment. The documentation is incomplete riddled with errors, the code has some pretty glaring bugs, and it's close to abandoned. It's a shame because you can do some really amazing stuff with it.
People don't build TUIs because they want to run apps in the terminal, they build them because the terminal happens to be the most portable app platform available.
The distinction is - if it runs over ssh (no x / graphics login) or on a headless machine - TUI
If it requires graphics login, even if it uses character layouts - GUI
IMHO the T/G is not for the display elements, it's for the type of session.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but X11 runs over ssh just fine. No "graphics login" required.
Yes and no. Early DOS UIs had elements of TUIs and GUIs, and supported mice. Many old school greenscreen applications were like this too.
My ancient boxed copy of Visual Basic for DOS 1.0 that supported mouse clicks on TUI buttons would have found your viewpoint quite offensive if it had any AI in it ;-) Oh boy, good old days.
Reddit moment!
This is exactly the kind of passive aggressive attitude that is tolerated on HN that makes this place unbearable.
"This is dumb" - gets downvoted to oblivion. "This is nonsensical + a bunch of absolutely bs reasoning" - second most upvoted comment atm.
HN tolerates the appearance of quality discourse over the actual thing, and dealing with this dissonance in most comment sections is exhausting.
Man, I've had so much frustrating just trying to copy & paste from inside a terminal running e.g. opencode or crush.
I think TUIs are neat, I guess. But I think these things have abused the concept extensively. They don't actually interact well with the rest of a Unix environment.
Hold down a key (alt, I think) to prevent clicks.
As a german, I say:
UIUIUI
Drawing a “nonsense” line between TUIs and GUIs is pretty arbitrary, it’s all pixels on a screen at the end of the day. People like the TUI vibe, and that’s a good enough reason to make and use them.
I love TUIs but one main reason for that is that they're keyboard centric. If I have to use the mouse it kills it for me, if both work then it's fine. I hope that modern TUI makers keep this in mind. What's great about the keyboard centric is that with a few keystrokes/shortcuts it's very easy to do repeatable work and takes less energy than hunting boxes to click on with the mouse.
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I actually agree with that. And I enjoy the fact that TUIs are becoming popular. But there is more to it than just the 'vibe'.
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If you think the 'mouse-clickable' aspect is bothering me, you missed my point entirely.
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I really don't want my TUI's to look like GUI's rendered in low res. The appeal to me of a TUI is that it is built specifically to be a TUI, and that means eschewing complexity and detail, and favouring compact text.
> GUI's rendered in low res
That's literally what TUI's looked like starting from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s... You have a pointing device, might as well make use of it to enhance discoverability.
This seems really reductive. Some UI paradigms work better at 80x24 vs at 640x480 (never mind whatever resolutions we have access to today). Or rather, the 80x24 text grid is using more pixels than that, but everything is aligned to that lower resolution, and that fundamentally changes what makes sense to do. Floating windows that can be dragged around to arbitrary positions? Terrible for low-res; classic for higher res. Dividing lines that split the screen into panels, and can be moved around a row or column at a time with a keyboard shortcut? Pretty much the opposite (enthusiasts of "tiling WMs" might disagree).
None of the TUI's I use look like that.
They all have very different structure to what a typical GUI look like. E.g. a focus on condensing more information in few text cells, and usually not displaying anything extraneous, typically rarely using dialogs etc.
There are notable exceptions to that, sure, but as I noted that is exactly what I have no interest in.
Didn't they evolve from that because better graphics was better? Otherwise why not stay text if there is a huge advantage in all Text made graphics?
This is why I don't like TUIs at all, they're really bad at displaying complex information, handling complex interactions, and discovering how to compose those together.
Most of my complex information is text, for which TUI's work just fine.
For the rest, I typically use a browser.
Interesting idea, but:
> Design once, generate production-ready code for your framework of choice. Switch targets without touching your design. Alpha notice: Code export is not functional yet. We're actively working on it — check back soon.
In other words, it isn't at all usable right now. You can't produce a TUI with it, not even a limited one.
You can still design the layout. That’s useful, but not nearly as useful as they are planning.
Why do you believe anything the site claims? It might all be hallucinations anyways, and others report not even being able to open the app.
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Vibe-coded trash, even says so in the Readme. Not sure why this gets voted to the frontpage.
Better get ready for almost all software to use AI assistance in its creation.
You can build great things using AI agents, and you can build trash.
Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.
Way to read something into what I have never even wrote and try to spin it as something ideological. This is not "AI-assisted", it's completely vibe-coded by AI and the software doesn't even make sense since you can't export anything. It's just low-quality trash dumped on Hacker News and I'd argue this is not the place for it.
Not gonna like, I am having to actively fight the aversion I feel when reading something was "all written by claude", it is so hard to check if it was properly done or pure garbage, I don't even take the time to check.
I know this position is wrong, but it feels hard to spend my time on something that someone else might not have spent the time to create
It's not anything though. It's a website and electron app that promises functionality that completely isn't there. It's useless, but instead of being art, it promises functionality, so it's functionally trash.
I too remember running `rails new MyGreatApp` and having hoop dreams of being the next billionaire entrepreneur, but a boilerplate app is a boilerplate app.
Of course you can build great things with AI, but trash written by AI is worse than trash written by a human, and some things are just trash.
theres a difference between AI-assistance and vibe coding. One of them requires you to know what you're doing and make good design choices
Opinions do not win by "high score". Asserting the validity of opinions based on how widely they are held is dumb.
If 30% of devs love openclaw, I'm not re-examining my informed opinion, I am forming a new one about that 30% cohort.
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Ignore the haters. This is an excellent idea, I'm getting some old Borland vibes. Keep it up, can't wait to see where it goes!
Ignore the haters, sure. But don't ignore the well argumented criticism that you're getting from an overwhelming majority of your peers, as it's happening right now.
>can't wait to see where it goes!
Fall into this toxic positivity nonsense at your own peril.
"Majority of peers" has never experienced proper TUI in their life, and their opinion is hardly relevant.
Toxic positivity? At your own peril? OMFG.
Let's imagine one do. What do you think can actually happen that is so negative? Toxic TUI will hunt you in dreams?
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Funny how you can tell a project is vibe-coded just from a first glance at its website. All these websites seem to somehow have the same visual style. Anyone noticed this?
Yep, my fans started revving as soon as I loaded it. Animations are out of control on the normal web as it is, but genAI sites take it to another level.
That, too, though I'm sure that particular problem is mainly because of the textual animation in the background.
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Same, and it lags simply trying to scroll down the page. Unacceptable.
This is why I recommend NoScript.
What is the point of having this if code generation is not functional yet? That is the entire point of this app.
TUIs are very in right now. Nostalgia/vintage-computin-aesthetics & guru-gatekeeping around command line savviness are front and centre in the HN-and-adjacent mindshare.
I think it's AI tools, they are often done as tuis, they work well with text, the cli is a text processing god that is easy to extend with cli utilities, and since you find yourself in the terminal much nicer having TUIs quickly available, editor, git client, etc. I love the shift to the terminal as I use it a lot anyways (I'm old), but the missing piece for me is having a good sql tui client that does at least some of what data grip does. So I'm building my own as an experiment into agentic coding something from scratch (which I think what this TUI Studio is also). Surprised how good it is but also surprised how much time it takes to get things polished.
It's strange. For decades we've been trying to move towards GUIs, now we're moving backwards.
To show off an AI generated website
Exactly.
Comments in this one are embarrassing. Some of you will find a way to complain about anything.
This is going to end up with TUIs that resemble old BBS ANSI art, such as https://16colo.rs/
It completely misses the reason people like current TUIs.
I agree. The animation on the site lost me when it placed a button. IMO, buttons are not part of TUIs. Those are just low-resolution GUIs, IMO, and that’s sort of the worst of all worlds. The first good TUIs were things like top and elm.
FWIW, I still love to see the old BBS UIs and ANSI art. But that's probably just nostalgia talking.
FYI LLMs are great at generating the ascii art, so you can create real fun games and TUIs that look like old school BBSs.
We can remain grateful the kids haven't discovered how to use figlet in HN comments.
ENSHT comes for everyone. This is sexual selection over natural selection. Claude Code also gets this wrong, they got way to fancy and ruined what a good tui is by being an uncanny combo between a scrolling log and a completely rewritten canvas.
Apparently we now write desktop applications intended for designing the UI of other desktop applications, in TypeScript that runs in a Docker container, using a bunch of web frameworks (including for CSS) and self-hosting an nginx server?
I would have expected a TUI editor to be itself a TUI.
If you want inspiration on all kinds of TUIs on show and display Terminal Trove [1] is useful to get an idea for what other tools look like.
I find the search [2] also helpful.
[1] https://terminaltrove.com/
[2] https://terminaltrove.com/explore/
People really want to bring back Visual Basic.
Watched the video. Why isn't the editor a TUI itself?
Because a website is easier to use and more accessible.....
If that is the case, why would you have TUIs at all?
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This one is not very accessible, try using tab + arrow keys to focus anything on the sidebar.
Great question.
A number of years ago I hacked together something conceptually similar [1]. It was for design and demonstration of CLI tooling (not TUI). It used its own DSL which included command definitions and demo output for invocations.
It created a replica CLI that behaved the way the real thing would, for quick prototyping and design feedback. The next step [2] would have been generating backend for different languages/libraries to create the actual CLI.
I lost the original sample "buddy" files but we did use it for prototyping a new Chef Workstation cli. Copies still haunt the Internet [3]
[1] defunct, https://github.com/marcparadise/clibuddy
[2] had I continued to need it
[3] https://github.com/gridgentoo/chef-workstation/blob/master/d...
Why are these things being built on web technologies? There's loads of "modern" terminals that use typescript etc. to me terminal means lower level.
Also wheres the Linux version? You've Mac, windows, and docker. When someone says terminal to me I default to Linux.
For exports, it is missing the ultimate: Borland Turbo Vision, the Rolls-Royce of TUI frameworks.
This looks really cool. However, the current AI models are pretty good at designing UIs from prompts and even turning screenshots of mocks into full UIs. I'm not sure this visual design approach would save time vs simply prompting an AI agent.
That being said, I could see a niche market for a designer persona who is used to building in tools like figma.
also, this assumes humans are still the primary CLI consumers. With agents increasingly being the first-class users of command-line tools, building visual design tooling for terminal UIs feels like optimizing for a shrinking audience.
Well you still need some human prompting the AI and looking at results, no? :)
Agents aren't picky with UI, so most effort will always be spent designing for humans, even if they are not the primary consumers.
Missing Ratatui[1] support.
[1] https://ratatui.rs/
The TUI hype seems like nostalgia for COBOL mainframe apps that most people have never even used. A sort of secondhand cyberpunk role play with zero focus on actual UX.
Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
Have you ever watched someone USE those COBOL TUIs? Everyone from airline ticket agents, to local governments, to folks at Home Depot while looking up inventory. They could fly through menus and accomplish things. I remember when Best Buy switched to a Windows-based experience. It was terrible. Simply adding a mouse+windowing experience slowed everything way down. I saw it first hand at Target too. They went from an OS/2-based TUI to Windows NT. I know there'll always be those folks that think we're all just trying to play "leet Haxorz", but there's just something about those systems that people deeply connected with.
I personally think the opencode and kilo CLI have great UX, certainly better (and easier to use) than the web versions of both.
A lot of the recent TUI apps are really not old-school in any way. Not all apps need the feature-set of a browser engine. And compared to native mac/linux desktop apps, TUIs get cross-platform support by default.
> Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
We all know the answer to this
TUIs are great coz they work seamlessly over shell, but there is no reason for that for editor.
The lack of accessibility of TUIs is not great in general.
I'd much rather terminals emulator provide a webview directly, and maybe use https://webtui.ironclad.sh/ if you really want the look.
I think it makes more sense for a cli to offer a mini webserver instead.
Think `fish_config`, but opened in the terminal directly [0].
[0]: like https://iterm2.com/browser-plugin.html
> The lack of accessibility of TUIs is not great in general.
Interesting. In what ways? I haven't heard anyone express this concern before.
Depending on how the TUI is made, it can be very visual, but lacks structure for a screen reader (unless you stay in the very simple "input field: value" kind of prompt, but even then auto completion is tricky).
Web browsers offer the DOM to tools such as screen readers (OSs offer their own accessibility sdks). Someday perhaps the TUI application could talk to the terminal emulator that would itself talk to the accessibility sdk of the OS and that info would somehow then be accessible.
There was a beginning of discussion at bubble tea[0] about this for example.
[0]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea/issues/780
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The interesting meta-pattern here is how often the tooling around a problem lags the problem itself by 5-10 years. The operational complexity exists, the pain is real, but because it's distributed across many small actors rather than concentrated in a few large ones, the market for structured solutions is slower to develop. That's usually a signal rather than a dead end — it means the first tool that actually fits the workflow, rather than a generic workflow tool, has real leverage.
A UI design tool for TUIs -- made with Electron?... fun times!
I give it a month before someone launches a TUI-TUI.
You can run it as a web app, no need for electron.
Just `bun run dev`
That is concerning.
This is a vibe coded app and isn't what I'd want but still, it's interesting to consider what a good implementation of "Figma for TUIs" could be, especially if it avoids the trap of simply treating the console as a crude raster instead of taking advantage of text and keyboards. IMO we don't need WIMP GUI shoved into terminal emulators.
Look up Visual Basic for Dos for a surprisingly good TUI editor!
Old VB is still king for laying out interfaces, for the narrowest of use cases today, bu still... Makes me sad how much we regressed due to the web.
Yes!
Half surprised there's no raratui export with the other options. That said, probably lends itself more to Ink and @opentui/react. Also slightly disappointed at the lack of a direct Linux build for AppImage and/or Flathub. Also not using Github's releases which is a little curious.
So we’re going full circle here right? Can’t wait for the first TUI MVC/MVVM/MVP/M-whatever framework to show up.
On one hand this is a neat idea. I've thought about how nice it would be to have a visual layout tool for text-based designs. The current offerings are slim. Of course, you could easily argue that if you need a visual tool for it, you've gone too far; even the most sophisticated TUIs are still extremely simple.
On the other hand, for this work as they describe, it needs to be a complete UI framework across a bunch of languages and built on top of a bunch of existing frameworks. That seems... ambitious. Building one UI framework for one language is plenty hard enough.
What I find interesting about this is the second-order effect. The obvious first-order impact is well discussed, but the downstream implications for smaller players in the ecosystem usually take 6-12 months to materialize. That lag creates both risk and opportunity — the teams that model it early tend to be better positioned when the shift actually hits.
This is so cool I immediately wanted to convert my apps. But then when I thought about it, well it's trying to recreate CSS but in a majorly worse way.
Browsers are ubiquitous and I can just tell ai to build a web page. I can't really see a use case other than novelty.
If you need a UI over SSH or inside tmux, skipping browsers and CSS isn't just a novelty, it's essential since HTML can't touch that territory. TS-based layout in terminals can be ugly but it also dodges a pile of accessibility, latency and bloat issues you get by default with anything running in Chrome.
k9s, ncdu, htop, powertop are good showcases how a TUI reduces mental load and are superior to browsers and / or other GUI tools
More importantly, it also reduces CPU and memory load.
Gonna see if I can implement https://chiptune.app in an actual TUI with this.
Nope, check out something like wiretext, look at this example I put together very quickly
https://wiretext.app/w/WUtjS1bk
In this age, rich TUI's feels wrong to me. Tools that expose a minimal web server with a lightweight UI is much more welcome than a complex TUI. But for most interactive terminal apps, it feels more natural when there is a single input at a time, like a wizard interface.
I'd have liked a lot more screenshots on the front page of the outcomes.
Turbo Vision and Clipper want their glory MS-DOS days back.
Nowadays we have Unicode characters and better colors though.
MS-DOS always had better colors than UNIX, a framebuffer isn't the same a vt100.
I do agree Unicode is better than code pages, or doing alt + num pad codes.
And Ashton-Tate's Framework IV on an 8088 with a MDA display.
> No install fuss — download and start designing immediately.
also
> Gatekeeper blocks the app immediately. You'll see either "TUIStudio cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer" or "TUIStudio is damaged and can't be opened" on newer macOS after quarantine flags the binary. To get past it: right-click the .app → Open → Open anyway — or go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway".
tbf that's Apple's fault, not the choice of the free, unpaid open source developer.
Apple's fault that they didn't bother to edit the text that says "No install fuss"?
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You mean the AI agent that was prompted to vibe code this?
The biggest pain point with TUIs has always been the design iteration loop. You're basically writing code blind, running it, tweaking numbers, running again. It's like writing CSS without a browser preview.
Something like this could genuinely help for the layout/positioning phase, even if you still hand-write the interaction logic. The debate about whether these are "real TUIs" kind of misses the point imo. Textual and Ratatui already blur that line with mouse support and rich widgets. The ship sailed on pure keyboard-only text interfaces a while ago.
What I'd actually want from a tool like this is to export to multiple TUI frameworks. Right now you're locked into one ecosystem and the code export isn't even working yet, which makes the whole thing feel premature.
A TUI library with hot reload would be pretty cool
TUIs built today should be usable by AI agents. I'm not sure exactly what it looks like but I'm imagining that every UI view has an associated CLI command that can yield precisely that view. Maybe like formally structured breadcrumbs, or maybe like Emacs "keyboard macros".
I've found agents effective using GUI apps with nothing but the ability to take screenshots and send mouse and keyboard commands. I imagine they'd work even better with a TUI, even if it's not designed with agents in mind at all.
Agents excel at using CLI tools with well-written "--help". So maybe consider that instead of TUI.
Yes, they do, but the premise in my comment (and this discussion) is that a TUI is being written today.
Somewhat related: Tachikoma.jl can do windows inside a terminal UI. https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-tachikoma-jl-a-termina...
Have been spending so much time in the terminal lately for the first time in my life (non-developer here) that made this for fun to spruce it up: https://github.com/dvelton/terminal-profile-studio
I'm not sure the utility of this kind of stuff anymore. It's relatively easy to sketch a layout on a napkin + prompt and then prompt claude code to use python textual as as TUI layer. I've had pretty good success with Textual+Claude so have a few colleagues. You could probably use Figma + claude etc as well.
For {root} sake I'm a designer. Mostly all the code has been written by Claude and ad latere.
Probably why the actual product, the code export, isn't working. I doubt it ever will. Neat toy, though.
OP if you care to indulge - why did you decide to work on this? vs just work on a TUI directly.
tip: your git repo's description (not readme, repo description) does not link the website. It should.
Also fill the Website field in About section.
I built something like this in 1993, it was used to design layouts for DOS apps and headers for printed listings. Imitating the BorlandPascal and Novel TUIs of the day
Gotta say I did sort of expect this to be a TUI app itself.
The one thing these always miss is image protocols. Do you plan to support terminal image protocols like sixel, kitty image protocol, etc.?
This looks really cool. Is the use case of getting an LLM to respond with custom TUIs something you have thoughts about?
We got a RAD IDE for terminals before GTA6 and before anyone sensibly makes a replacement for Electron. Wild.
This is really cool though.
I seem to remember having a RAD IDE for terminals with Turbo Pascal back in the 1990s. But yea, still before GTA6.
I wonder if one of the LLMs could generate code from a screenshot of a layout designed by this.
Claude Code built a TUI for me last night, in this case to step through nanosecond timestamped ITCH market data messages and rebuild an order book visual in the terminal. This type of stuff would have taken a day - but done in 5 minutes now.
There's something incredibly ironic about a visual tool for designing TUIs...
That's cool. I literally vibed something similar a month ago for myself!
I would be REALLY REALLY impressed if it manages to do this without bugs. Just using pythons textual can be very complex, belive it or not. Maaging not only to that but other frameworks too sounds insanely complex. I have a strong feeling this is vibecoded from the commit history?`
Ah yes, it says clearly that on the github page. Still, if its works, I am then impressed by the LLM.
Edit: It does, in fact, NOT work for code export. Level of impressiveness massively dropped.
Yeah, the website has many bugs too. Literally can't click on 50% of the "clickable" stuff. Not impressed by vibe coded nonsense. The comments here are weird, people are discussing the "idea" rather than the broken implementation.
Probably a bad omen of things to come for the internet.
Guess who's back, back again?
VB's back, tell a friend.
Am I the only one who thinks the recent TUI explosion is absolutely not necessary?
I mean yes, code editor are great for this but a lot of the TUIs I see are so slow it begs the question why they exist to begin. CLIs are supposed to be remixable and scriptable.
I think a better architecture would be to generally keep CLIs work like CLIs and have separate processes that add terminal rendering functionalities for those that need / want it but in general it is an anti-pattern to start from this as default.
I feel like they are a workaround to GUIs being slow and bloated Electron apps.
But I wish we'd just make fast GUIs instead of giving up and building TUIs instead.
Depends highly on the specific application. Take a simple example of looking at process usage. You can use ps from the command line to get all sorts of info about a process. But there’s no substitute for top to show you an updating list of top cpu consumers, which ps just can’t do.
That's roughly aligned with my thinking. Make it a CLI. And if there's a lot of configuration that you can pass to it, have an option for rendering those options as a TUI.
Of course it's not necessary, it's a fashion. Choosing to make a TUI instead of a GUI is a fashion statement, it signals aesthetic alignment with nerdy shit and says the program isn't meant for common proles. There's pretty much nothing a TUI can do that a GUI can't do, while the opposite is very much not the case.
See also all the programmer blogs that feel the need to use a monospaced font for prose, to signal that they're a programmer.
The fact that this app isn’t itself a TUI is kinda telling, tbh.
The background ASCII animation is so cool! Is it an actual simulation?
Use the source Luke! It's an "ASCII plasma background" rendered into a canvas element.
Turbo Vision strikes back
One can only dream
The irony that a TUI studio is not written as a TUI...
this is a cool idea lol but is a pretty nonsensical explanation of what you can even do with it
No ratatui?!
So this is a TUI WYSIWYG GUI ?
This is amazing! Just think how incredible this would have been to have in the 80's and 90's in some similar format.
The website UI is unreal, I loved the idea
I wish HN had flairs (tags) like Reddit and mandated a few for AI-related work (AI-Assisted, AI-meta, AI-vibecoding) or something so these could be filtered out
Missing ncurses support.
When your TUI is so complex that you need a GUI to design it, perhaps you shouldn't use TUI in the first place.
I'm not sure that's a fair criticism. Many things require or benefit from something even more complex to make them (car -> factory, code -> IDE, text -> editor, food -> kitchen). I think the real debate here is that which is found in the other comments: do we want TUIs to look like GUIs?
Why did they make a website?
The corners of the boxes appear in the wrong place in the cell.
I don't think there is utf8 characters that allow for drawing on the outside of the cell, (happy to be wrong)
┌ (U+250C), ┐ (U+2510), └ (U+2514), ┘ (U+2518) <-- these 4 draw in the middle of the cell.
｢ (U+FF62), ⌟, (U+231F), <-- these are two that cover part of the outside, but not the other corners.
｢┐└｣
Can anyone tells me how to get those 'corner of cell' characters, including uprights and horizontals ?
This is so cool.
Seems nice.
I launched https://github.com/alganet/tuish yesterday (pure shell backend).
Exporting to pure shell could be a killer feature, especially for smaller and ad-hoc apps (no dependencies, no compilation, etc).
Noice figma for terminals! Dude super cool idea, great job =D
This is like QTdesigner but for the terminal. Huh.
I really hate these pointlessly dynamic website backgrounds that make mobile devices hot to touch. Unfortunately vibe-coded websites love these.
I want something like that, but for Bootstrap,Tailwind or Quasar
The fact that this isn't a TUI itself is a bit disappointing.
The fact that even the preview isn't a TUI is just lame. Keyboard controls are also non-functional right now.
Anyone notice the computer image at the top of the page doesn't have the right number of keys?
I find it slightly annoying and disappointing that the blocks saying what frameworks it's designed to export to aren't links to those frameworks.
I don’t want to be a curmudgeon, but why not just use CSS, HTML, React, etc. at this point? You could choose a style that looks like a TUI.
But will it render in a terminal over ssh?
(I know, I know, port forwarding should work for a web app.)
It actually will given the excellent quality of text based browsers now.
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this looks insanely cool.
One of the most original ideas I have seen on HackerNews in the past few years.
This website eats a whole CPU core
Another W from the web developers mafia
+1 on this
No idea why this is hyped up these days.
The only reason I can think of is what I said before [0] given that the web was destroyed by the same web developers, then so was the desktop (with Electron) and now of all places terminals are now getting destroyed with infinite slop like this.
This nonsense will continue and accelerate until it reaches hardware.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210187
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Amazing cool design tool for TUI's I got it running instantly and it feels stable and complete as well. Only 10 stars in GitHub.
Ha, well proof that AI let's you build anything you can imagine. Wait till I show you Remote Desktop, one day macOS and Linux will catch up.