4 ms·
The next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now
- ftchd 7mo agoman I want to know where their creativity comes from, it's like they've built an entire world with a story... but it's just a (highly regarded) collection of packages
- atkrad 7mo agoIt's intentional design. They picked a strong visual identity early and applied it consistently; the name, the color palette, the retro terminal feel. Every package looks like it belongs to the same family. Most open source projects never think about this. Charm did from day one.
- zelphirkalt 7mo agoThis has led to a completely overblown design of at least their website. All these cutesy pictures of bubble tea, way too big graphical wrappers, no simple page that is labeled "screenshots", no explanation what "bubbletea" actually is, ... One would think it to be a simple task to mention somewhere that this is a TUI library, where one can see it at the first glance. But apparently not. Instead I am seeing: Your new coding bestie, now available in your favourite terminal. Your tools, your code, and your workflows, wired into your LLM of choice. This is artificial intelligence made glamourous. Eh, so something about AI tools? And is "Crush" another tool than "bubbletea"? Why am I seeing something about "Crush" and not about "bubbletea"? Maybe it's simply not my taste. For a TUI library, I expect serious listings of what it can do, what it supports, what it helps you with. Is it a layer on top of ncurses? Features and use-cases over meaningless authority arguments like "Look who uses this too!". I also see: We make the command line glamorous. I don't want my command line to change! I configured it to be just how I like it. What they mean is, that they make command line applications using their library "glamorous" (whatever that means). I have a suggestion for a better slogan: "Your advanced command line widgets library" or "Library for advanced TUI applications". Maybe I am nitpicking too much.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- slopinthebag 7mo agoI think it's both completely valid to feel this way, and also valid for them to have fun with their design and aesthetic. If you already know what charm does, it makes perfect sense and is cool to see.
- tokioyoyo 7mo agoFrom my interactions with younger engineers, this is what "they're looking for". I think we're just used to a different format, so our expectations don't match the reality. Our instincts are different, maybe? Not sure.
- taurath 7mo agoNo, it still sucks, it’s genAI and the author uses twitter. Younger engineers veer the heck away from stuff that “looks” of a culture but isn’t.
- triyambakam 7mo agoThey've been doing this since well before genAI
- jasonjmcghee 7mo agoYou aren't. When your content sounds like slop you drive people away. Honestly amazes me you'd put so much effort into brand and not do copywriting yourself.
- reaperducer 7mo agoWe make the command line glamorous. Awesome for one man bands. Or maybe Panic. But my Finance department is never going to approve that purchase.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- nimchimpsky 7mo ago[dead]
- neom 7mo agoI don't understand what this is but I kinda want it. Is it kinda cool-retro-term + starship?
- joshka 7mo agoGo libraries for making terminal UIs - https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea - https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbles https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbles - https://github.com/charmbracelet/lipgloss https://github.com/charmbracelet/lipgloss
- pennomi 7mo agoBut why when Claude can write you a perfectly laggy tui in react?
- written-beyond 7mo agoIt may be a coincidence but there has been an increase in thinly veiled humor in HN comments.
- collingreen 7mo agoWould be fun to see some data on this and see if it matches or conflicts with your feeling. Probably someone out there with some public sentiment analysis of hn - I wonder if you can pull out snark or cynical sarcasm from something like that.
- keyle 7mo agoThanks finally some clarity. I've been using tcell, it's been fine... This just looks like fancy TUI without real benefits but wowing the user at first run...
- zabzonk 7mo agoPlease, a simple web page that tells me what this does, and why I should use it. Links to github have never done this for me.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- yegle 7mo agohttps://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea has a couple screencast worth checking out. Not sure if it's a good comparison (never used both in depth) but think of this a Go version of all the goodies from https://textual.textualize.io/ https://textual.textualize.io/
- 1-more 7mo agoBubble tea is a library for handling TUIs using the Elm architecture, often abbreviated TEA: a model type, a message type, an update function that refreshes the model and emits side effects, and a view function that renders the UI given the model state. The article link goes to the releases page, but the top level README of the project has much better info. For a related library in Rust check out Iced: https://book.iced.rs https://book.iced.rs
- WhyNotHugo 7mo agoSomehow this whole ecosystem of tools always gives me a bad vibe, and I can't quite pinpoint why. All the demos and videos are applications with lots of stacked pop-ups/modal windows, and things moving around continuously. It all reminds me of what we typically see in computers in TV shows or sci-fi films. It just looks like a chaotic mess of things, and I get this really strong urge to just stay away from it all.
- zipping1549 7mo agoBubbletea is actually pretty cool. I also agree that the website doesn't look so good.
- thiht 7mo agoIt looks amazing. Websites and projects are allowed to have personality and use flashy colors.
- djfergus 7mo agoFor me its the fact a large chunk of my terminal experience is over limited bandwidth connections to laggy servers with varying feature support. I appreciate the eye candy and what they have achieved but I don't need it, I just want TUIs to work everywhere with low latency.
- gladiatr72 7mo agoYeah. nothing quite like ANSI code dumps at 9600 bps.
- reaperducer 7mo agoI did a sudo apt upgrade at 600 baud this morning. Life is weird.
- pealco 7mo agoIt reminds me of "web3" marketing. My hackles are immediately raised.
- GaggiX 7mo agoIt took me too long to understand that this is just a TUI library for Go
- AberrantJ 7mo agoThank you, I was excited for new drinks and flavors and this saved me the read.
- allthetime 7mo agoI thought there had been a major breakthrough in tapioca-tech
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoThank you. I kept looking at the page trying to figure out WTF it even was, and was unsuccessful. Damn, I wish I had a cane so I could shake it at these devs.
- jofzar 7mo agoIt's crazy how much this UI design is like future retro 2008 design.
- abrinz 7mo agoI've been building a coding agent (https://github.com/abrinsmead/cogent https://github.com/abrinsmead/cogent) on the previous version of bubble tea for the past few weeks and it has been nice to work with (though honestly I'm not touching much code). The biggest blocker I have is that I haven't been able to simultaneously support both mouse wheel scrolling and the ability to select text for copy and paste. I understand that this is a limitation of pretty much all terminals, but we have seen it solved in Claude Code. Maybe this new version has a solution.
- mlazos 7mo agoMaybe I’m getting old but I couldn’t tell if this was a joke or not. I think they should explain a little more like what these products actually do?
- RS-232 7mo ago“lipgloss”?
- wavemode 7mo agohow exactly does the Charm corporation make money?
- wonger_ 7mo agoHm good question. Seems like VC investment money? https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/02/charm-offensive-googles-gradient-backs-this-startup-to-bring-more-pizzazz-to-the-command-line/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/02/charm-offensive-googles-gr... > Charm had previously raised around $4 million in funding spread across various angel and seed rounds, and now the company is adding a further $6 million to its coffers, with Google’s VC fund Gradient Ventures leading the charge, supported by Cavalry Ventures, Fuel Capital, Firestreak, and a slew of angel backers. https://charm.land/blog/the-next-generation/ https://charm.land/blog/the-next-generation/ There used to be development of enterprise and cloud offerings, but that seems to have disappeared. Hopefully they keep the "hobby project that people decided to throw money at" vibe and don't start chasing business incentives.
- lithiumii 7mo agoIt's cute. My main complaint is I was expecting some real next-gen bubble tea.
- Sparkle-san 7mo agoWe will have to keep waiting. The science isn't there yet.
- monster_truck 7mo agoBranding aside, if I have to use -50% magnification to get to a readable text size, your text is far, far too large. Why is this website yelling at me Why is it so hard to figure out what any of this does? I just want some screenshots
- amingilani 7mo agoAs someone that zooms into websites including HN by default, I for one appreciate the text size :)
- collingreen 7mo agoI think this is the real insight - would be nice to go back to this being easily user controlled.
- nsonha 7mo agoIs is just me or this is the first website with a sensible text size (relative to the lenght of the content) and every other (legacy) sites on the internet has way too small text?
- otterley 7mo agoWe sure are putting a lot of investment into 1970s-era user interfaces! (That said, I do appreciate the artistic flair that went into their website.)
- oefrha 7mo agoSurprised huh v2 isn't included in this and there's no mention of it in the release announcement at all. Quite a few of my apps mix bubbletea/bubbles and huh in different parts of the app, and while they're typically separate and technically could coexist no problem, it would feel a bit weird. Plus huh is advertised as "can be integrated into a Bubble Tea application"; I'm not using it personally but it's surely used by some users. Anyone from charmbracelet here could comment on the situation?
- switchbak 7mo agoMaybe it's a generational thing, but if I proposed to my coworkers in 2003 that we should build an app(lication!) with "Go, bubble tea and huh" - I would be laughed out of the room and onto the unemployment line.
- oefrha 7mo agoWould you have been laughed out of the room if you proposed to use a vcs called git?
- jasongi 7mo agoMy favourite library from these folks is gum (https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum). The basic premise is simple - instead of using hardcoded variables or in addition/instead of using CLI flags, call gum and capture the STDOUT to get the selected input value(s). Great for turning a bash script into a TUI, uses these libraries under the hood. I find the pattern of showing interactive TUI if required options/flags are omitted much nicer than showing an error/help output.
- sanex 7mo agoI don't know what I would build with these but I'll think of something because they're so awesome.
- beart 7mo agoI love this design language to death. I know a lot of engineers prefer a no-frills, straight to the point readme (as reflected in these comments), and I get that. But I also don't want to live in a world made out of nothing but boxes. It feels a bit like visiting Fallingwater and complaining that there are no arrows pointing to the bathroom.
- switchbak 7mo agoNot to worry, ChatGPT will be happy to oblige and make every other repo look as unique and special as this one.
- oDot 7mo agoShameless related plug for my recent project Trolley, which lets you package a TUI as a desktop app, for your non-technical users or otherwise: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley
- bikelang 7mo agoStoked to see this! I’ve been using bubble tea and all its accoutrements on various little hobby projects for the past few years. Love the ergonomics and aesthetics and can’t wait to try out v2!
- mvdtnz 7mo ago[flagged]
- ratrace 7mo ago[dead]
- rothific 7mo agoTheory: terminal apps are closing the agent self-improvement loop because agents can use TUIs more easily than web/desktop/mobile. Anomaly, which builds OpenCode + OpenTUI), is also doing some really interesting stuff in this space with their custom renderer. And then there's Ink (https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink) which is what Claude Code uses. I also built Ink Web (https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web) to make Ink work in the browser. The virality of OpenClaw and Claude Code has me wondering if terminals could actually go mainstream (eg used by non-tech users). More thoughts here: https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-03-05-terminals-are-cool-again https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-03-05-terminals-are-cool-ag...
- TheDong 7mo agoYou know what's even easier for AI agents to use than TUIs? CLIs. My experience has been that agents suck at using TUIs, and are good at using CLIs. I would argue that agents are a reason that TUIs might die in favor of CLIs.
- rothific 7mo agoI agree, agents struggle with TUIs. I do think this is easy to fix though (here's an interesting approach: https://github.com/remorses/ghostty-opentui https://github.com/remorses/ghostty-opentui). I think agents will have much better luck with TUIs than browsers. The more interesting scenario IMO is having apps that are both TUIs AND CLIs where the agent uses the CLI but can pause and show the user a TUI for complex tasks where the user needs to input something.
- jcgl 7mo ago> I think agents will have much better luck with TUIs than browsers. I’m very skeptical. Why would you think that? TUIs inherently don’t provide programmatically accessible affordances; if they have any affordances at all, they’re purely visual cues that have unstandardized and of varying quality. Compare that to the DOM in a browser where you’ve got numerous well-understood mechanisms to convey meaning and usability. Semantic HTML and ARIA roles. These things systematically simplify programmatic consumption.
- ramoz 7mo ago> the terminal is the most powerful way to interface with the operating system. There's something about the UX here, how we're interfacing in an abstract way directly with the computer, now with agents. I hope we can get some interesting design study insights over the coming months and years. I don't see a UI replacing the experience we get with TUIs. Also, UIs seem very clunky, in relation to TUIs performance.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- JSR_FDED 7mo agoIs this like the new Turbo Vision from Borland? That’s something I’d love to have!
- roryirvine 7mo agoYep, pretty much. This website is a bit too hyperactive for my taste, and I can't imagine how they hope to make enough money from it to satisfy the VCs. But Bubbletea really is a great TUI and it's properly open source - so I'm happy to enjoy it while it lasts. I'm with you on the Turbo Vision love, though. Honestly, it felt we were getting to such a good place in the early/mid 90s with beautiful, well-thought-out TUIs becoming the norm. In retrospect, the universality of basic curses/ncurses on Unix/Linux (together with the death of DOS) was a real a step back - trapping us in a local pessimum for far too long. TUIs languished, and most of us moved to a mix of CLIs and GUIs. (There's an MIT-licensed port of Turbo Vision available now at https://github.com/magiblot/tvision https://github.com/magiblot/tvision - pity that it's a couple of decades too late!)
- eieio 7mo agoI'm so excited about this! And I expect the speed/bandwidth improvements in the new renderer to be very significant. I spent a while hacking on my own fork of the Bubbletea renderer over the last few months in order to run a game over SSH[1]. It was a ton of work for a niche, simple game (snake) but it dropped bandwidth usage by a factor of 10. The new renderer has to be more general so it might not quite hit that for all applications, but I bet it's not that far off. I could also see it being an even more significant gain for apps that use a lot of modern colors and styling, since escape sequences there can be very long / heavy weight. Some of the comments here are annoyed about the website branding but FWIW I think bubbletea and lipgloss (and wish, if you want SSH stuff) are really excellent tools for building "boring" TUIs too. [1] https://eieio.games/blog/secure-massively-multiplayer-snake/ https://eieio.games/blog/secure-massively-multiplayer-snake/
- TheDong 7mo ago[flagged]
- thiht 7mo agoWhy the snark about something that works well in practice?
- yvdriess 7mo agoIgnoring the snark for a second. It's not because you are unfamiliar with the go toolchain that it's inherently bad, nor does it put you in a good position to give accurate criticism. - "tea" is an explicit alias that was added to the import statement in the tutorial examples, which you did not reflect in your snippet: import tea "charm.land/bubbletea/v2" - The following also just works as you expected, but directly assumed wouldn't work: import github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea The only surprise here is that the repository authors decided to change the name of the module between v1 and v2 of the package. The git branch tagged v2 contains a module named 'charm.land/bubbletea', earlier v1 branches are named 'github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea'. That's on them for breaking convention and surprising users, the go toolchain does not factor into, this beyond supporting versioning by naming convention.
- cobertos 7mo agoAs long as all these next-gen terminal features don't make implementing a terminal from scratch as hard as implementing a browser. I like that terminals have less surface area that browsers
- vpribish 7mo agoNo popcorn? This needs popcorn
- bakul 7mo agoI just want a terminal that can also run fully graphical interfaces and that scroll as more lines are typed or a later command outputs text! Next level up from sixels or escape sequences.
- Chmouel 7mo agoi migrated my tui (lazyworktree) to it and it's been absolute pleasure, they finally fixed the isssue where row could not be "lipglossed"/colored as before (like on screenshots here https://chmouel.github.io/lazyworktree/#screenshots https://chmouel.github.io/lazyworktree/#screenshots)
- pekim 7mo agoI posted about this last week [1], but it didn't get any traction. Although I used a link to the release page rather than the blog announcement, so maybe that was why. ho hum [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138688
- xbar 7mo agoI am excited about this. I have been waiting for an opportunity to build some Elm-modeled tools for a long time and Charm's toolset has real appeal.