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TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool
- mipselaer 7mo agoAmazing cool design tool for TUI's I got it running instantly and it feels stable and complete as well. Only 10 stars in GitHub.
- grilo16 7mo agoNoice figma for terminals! Dude super cool idea, great job =D
- kantord 7mo agothis looks insanely cool. One of the most original ideas I have seen on HackerNews in the past few years.
- kantord 7mo agotip: your git repo's description (not readme, repo description) does not link the website. It should.
- mcraiha 7mo agoAlso fill the Website field in About section.
- aethorn 7mo agoThe website UI is unreal, I loved the idea
- tim-projects 7mo agoThis 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.
- purerandomness 7mo agok9s, ncdu, htop, powertop are good showcases how a TUI reduces mental load and are superior to browsers and / or other GUI tools
- xvilka 7mo agoMore importantly, it also reduces CPU and memory load.
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago[flagged]
- fidotron 7mo agoThis is going to end up with TUIs that resemble old BBS ANSI art, such as https://16colo.rs/ https://16colo.rs/ It completely misses the reason people like current TUIs.
- lsaferite 7mo agoFWIW, I still love to see the old BBS UIs and ANSI art. But that's probably just nostalgia talking.
- drob518 7mo agoI 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.
- genxy 7mo agoENSHT 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.
- gattilorenz 7mo agoLook up Visual Basic for Dos for a surprisingly good TUI editor!
- lsaferite 7mo agoI find it slightly annoying and disappointing that the blocks saying what frameworks it's designed to export to aren't links to those frameworks.
- glhaynes 7mo ago> 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".
- mholt 7mo agotbf that's Apple's fault, not the choice of the free, unpaid open source developer.
- glhaynes 7mo agoApple's fault that they didn't bother to edit the text that says "No install fuss"?
- butlike 7mo agoProbably don't know how now that the LLM helping them write the code has lost that context. From their github it appears all the code is llm-generated
- slopinthebag 7mo agoYou mean the AI agent that was prompted to vibe code this?
- eterps 7mo agoThis 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.
- banach 7mo agoOne justification for TUIs is remote access over SSH.
- eterps 7mo agoSure, 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- theowaway213456 7mo agoYou 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)
- roywiggins 7mo agoEven easier is just using an X server, if you have it set up properly you just need to run the remote app and the window pops up on your machine. (I think terminal-based GUIs are neat just for fluidity of use- you can pop one open during a terminal session and close it without switching to mouse or shifting your attention away from the terminal. They can also be a nice addon to a primarily CLI utility without introducing big dependencies)
- pcmoore 7mo agoWatched the video. Why isn't the editor a TUI itself?
- baranguneysel 7mo agoGreat question.
- jappgar 7mo agoBecause a website is easier to use and more accessible.....
- vidarh 7mo agoI 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- zozbot234 7mo ago> 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.
- m3kw9 7mo agoDidn'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?
- zahlman 7mo agoThis 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).
- vidarh 7mo agoNone 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.
- worthless-trash 7mo agoThe 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 ?
- worthless-trash 6mo agoThe fact that i'm the only one mentioning this probably means that most people here have a lot of opinions about writing TUI's but havne't really tried to do it from first concepts.
- trollbridge 7mo agoI 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.
- nine_k 7mo agoBut will it render in a terminal over ssh? (I know, I know, port forwarding should work for a web app.)
- trollbridge 7mo agoIt actually will given the excellent quality of text based browsers now.
- nine_k 7mo agoAgreed. Another thing that gives the TUI concept an edge is the lack of formatting options: no way to make a font too tiny or too huge, very little leeway in implementing common controls, any excessive whitespace looks jarring, etc. Icons are limited to the common emoji. All this makes you concentrate on providing functionality first.
- lagrange77 7mo agoThe background ASCII animation is so cool! Is it an actual simulation?
- ksherlock 7mo agoUse the source Luke! It's an "ASCII plasma background" rendered into a canvas element.
- jbstack 7mo agoInteresting 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.
- cestith 7mo agoYou can still design the layout. That’s useful, but not nearly as useful as they are planning.
- dymk 7mo agoWhy do you believe anything the site claims? It might all be hallucinations anyways, and others report not even being able to open the app.
- cestith 7mo agoThe app certainly opened for me. I don’t know that I’d use it. Design and layout of an interface is useful apart from the implementation though.
- varjag 7mo agoTurbo Vision strikes back
- JSR_FDED 7mo agoOne can only dream
- raincole 7mo agoWhen your TUI is so complex that you need a GUI to design it, perhaps you shouldn't use TUI in the first place.
- jbstack 7mo agoI'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?
- jappgar 7mo agoWhy did they make a website?
- MPSimmons 7mo agoThis is like QTdesigner but for the terminal. Huh.
- webprofusion 7mo agoHa, 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.
- sabas123 7mo agoWhat is the point of having this if code generation is not functional yet? That is the entire point of this app.
- moron4hire 7mo agoTo show off an AI generated website
- rvz 7mo agoExactly.
- nick_ 7mo agoTUIs 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.
- GalaxyNova 7mo agoIt's strange. For decades we've been trying to move towards GUIs, now we're moving backwards.
- keithnz 7mo agoI 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.
- SvenL 7mo agoSo we’re going full circle here right? Can’t wait for the first TUI MVC/MVVM/MVP/M-whatever framework to show up.
- __alexs 7mo agoThe 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?
- PunchyHamster 7mo agoTUIs are great coz they work seamlessly over shell, but there is no reason for that for editor.
- nobleach 7mo agoHave 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.
- elxr 7mo agoI 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
- elxr 7mo agoThe 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.
- _pdp_ 7mo agoAm 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.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoOf 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.
- javier123454321 7mo agoThat'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.
- drob518 7mo agoDepends 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.
- moron4hire 7mo agoAnyone notice the computer image at the top of the page doesn't have the right number of keys?
- NSPG911 7mo agoNope, check out something like wiretext, look at this example I put together very quickly https://wiretext.app/w/WUtjS1bk https://wiretext.app/w/WUtjS1bk
- igtztorrero 7mo agoI want something like that, but for Bootstrap,Tailwind or Quasar
- pjmlp 7mo agoTurbo Vision and Clipper want their glory MS-DOS days back.
- reaperducer 7mo agoAnd Ashton-Tate's Framework IV on an 8088 with a MDA display.
- xvilka 7mo agoNowadays we have Unicode characters and better colors though.
- pjmlp 7mo agoMS-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.
- jiehong 7mo agoThe 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/ 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 https://iterm2.com/browser-plugin.html
- xwiz 7mo ago> The lack of accessibility of TUIs is not great in general. Interesting. In what ways? I haven't heard anyone express this concern before.
- jiehong 7mo agoDepending 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 https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea/issues/780
- duskdozer 7mo agoTUIs seem like they should be well-suited to screen readers, but yeah accessibility is often unfortunately far down the list on average project priorities.
- BoredomIsFun 7mo agoTUIs sadly have become niche tech, and accessibility is rarely a concern for niche things.
- seertaak 7mo agoA UI design tool for TUIs -- made with Electron?... fun times!
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoWe got a RAD IDE for terminals before GTA6 and before anyone sensibly makes a replacement for Electron. Wild. This is really cool though.
- drob518 7mo agoI seem to remember having a RAD IDE for terminals with Turbo Pascal back in the 1990s. But yea, still before GTA6.
- mococa 7mo agoFor {root} sake I'm a designer. Mostly all the code has been written by Claude and ad latere.
- butlike 7mo agoProbably why the actual product, the code export, isn't working. I doubt it ever will. Neat toy, though.
- rvz 7mo agoNo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210187
- sunaookami 7mo agoVibe-coded trash, even says so in the Readme. Not sure why this gets voted to the frontpage.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoBetter 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.
- slopinthebag 7mo agoOf 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.
- sunaookami 7mo agoWay 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.
- mghackerlady 7mo agotheres a difference between AI-assistance and vibe coding. One of them requires you to know what you're doing and make good design choices
- butlike 7mo agoIt'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.
- 7mo ago
- xvilka 7mo agoMissing Ratatui[1] support. [1] https://ratatui.rs/ https://ratatui.rs/
- WhereIsTheTruth 7mo agoThis website eats a whole CPU core Another W from the web developers mafia
- uaghazade 7mo ago+1 on this
- injidup 7mo agoI'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.
- mihir_kanzariya 7mo ago[flagged]
- apitman 7mo agoA TUI library with hot reload would be pretty cool
- chuckadams 7mo agoGotta say I did sort of expect this to be a TUI app itself.
- voidUpdate 7mo agoIf 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 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?
- sorenjan 7mo agoYou can right click on it and choose "Show controls", at least in Firefox.
- voidUpdate 7mo agoOh, 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
- stanac 7mo agoIt's probably just <video> element without "controls" attribute. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/video#controls https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... > controls > If this attribute is present, the browser will offer controls to allow the user to control video playback, including volume, seeking, and pause/resume playback. Edit: I misunderstood, you are asking > how they'd managed to hide the video context menu Not sure, but it works in FF for me
- voidUpdate 7mo agoIts entirely possible I did something to it accidentally that made the context menu not work properly. I had the dev tools open to pull the actual video address when I right clicked, so I might have messed something up. Or maybe the devs are secretly looking at the comments and fixed it between me and you trying :P
- sandos 7mo agoI 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.
- shimman 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- clitui 7mo ago[dead]
- deevelton 7mo agoHave 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 https://github.com/dvelton/terminal-profile-studio
- spiffyk 7mo agoFunny 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?
- duskdozer 7mo agoYep, 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.
- spiffyk 7mo agoThat, too, though I'm sure that particular problem is mainly because of the textual animation in the background.
- duskdozer 7mo agoYeah it was. I've been hoping to get the time to write a userscript to identify and stop animations like that, but I haven't been able to understand the whole requestAnimationFrame thing enough yet.
- choward 7mo agoSame, and it lags simply trying to scroll down the page. Unacceptable.
- zahlman 7mo agoThis is why I recommend NoScript.
- duskdozer 7mo agoI'd given up on that a while ago because I basically had to disable it everywhere. But yeah this was custom inline js so my ublock filters didn't get it
- stldev 7mo agoIgnore 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!
- boca_honey 7mo agoIgnore 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.
- majkinetor 7mo agoToxic 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?
- dymk 7mo agoIt doesn’t even exist, you’re getting excited for a hallucination.
- mpalmer 7mo agoGatekeeper 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". A trusting, highly positive person could really be taken advantage of here.
- peddling-brink 7mo agoYes, but they are also in alpha, and you can’t actually export any code, so it’s pretty functionally useless. Neat concept though if it ends up working.
- Archit3ch 7mo agoSomewhat related: Tachikoma.jl can do windows inside a terminal UI. https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-tachikoma-jl-a-terminal-ui-framework-for-julia/135878/40 https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-tachikoma-jl-a-termina...
- TrevorFSmith 7mo agoThis 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.
- pelcg 7mo agoIf 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/ https://terminaltrove.com/ [2] https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ https://terminaltrove.com/explore/
- sorenjan 7mo agoI wonder if one of the LLMs could generate code from a screenshot of a layout designed by this.
- anonu 7mo agoClaude 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.
- __mharrison__ 7mo agoThe irony that a TUI studio is not written as a TUI...
- ganelonhb 7mo agoThe one thing these always miss is image protocols. Do you plan to support terminal image protocols like sixel, kitty image protocol, etc.?
- dangoodmanUT 7mo agoThere's something incredibly ironic about a visual tool for designing TUIs...
- ramon156 7mo agoNo ratatui?!
- ifh-hn 7mo agoWhy 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.
- aavci 7mo agoThis looks really cool. Is the use case of getting an LLM to respond with custom TUIs something you have thoughts about?
- _j3m4 7mo ago[flagged]
- auvi 7mo agoFor exports, it is missing the ultimate: Borland Turbo Vision, the Rolls-Royce of TUI frameworks.
- tracker1 7mo agoHalf 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.
- nout 7mo agoThat's cool. I literally vibed something similar a month ago for myself!
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Myrmornis 7mo agoTUIs 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".
- kees99 7mo agoAgents excel at using CLI tools with well-written "--help". So maybe consider that instead of TUI.
- Myrmornis 7mo agoYes, they do, but the premise in my comment (and this discussion) is that a TUI is being written today.
- apitman 7mo agoI'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.
- Venkymatam 7mo agothis is a cool idea lol but is a pretty nonsensical explanation of what you can even do with it
- monkaiju 7mo agoI 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
- aaronblohowiak 7mo agoSo this is a TUI WYSIWYG GUI ?
- oefrha 7mo agoI really hate these pointlessly dynamic website backgrounds that make mobile devices hot to touch. Unfortunately vibe-coded websites love these.
- NoGravitas 7mo agoMissing ncurses support.
- visarga 7mo agoI 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
- Felixbot 7mo ago[flagged]
- gaigalas 7mo agoSeems nice. I launched https://github.com/alganet/tuish 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).
- ctmnt 7mo agoOn 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.
- themarogee 7mo ago[dead]
- jbverschoor 7mo agoGuess who's back, back again? VB's back, tell a friend.
- pillsburycat 7mo agoThis 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.
- ajspig1 7mo agoalso, 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.
- pillsburycat 7mo agoWell 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.
- zahlman 7mo agoApparently 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.
- evrenesat 7mo agoIn 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.
- IAmGraydon 7mo agoThis is so cool.
- GrinningFool 7mo agoA 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 https://github.com/marcparadise/clibuddy [2] had I continued to need it [3] https://github.com/gridgentoo/chef-workstation/blob/master/docs/clibuddy/inline-target-converge-resource.bdy https://github.com/gridgentoo/chef-workstation/blob/master/d...
- binary132 7mo agoThe fact that this app isn’t itself a TUI is kinda telling, tbh.
- swyx 7mo agoOP if you care to indulge - why did you decide to work on this? vs just work on a TUI directly.
- docmars 7mo agoThis is amazing! Just think how incredible this would have been to have in the 80's and 90's in some similar format.
- montag 7mo agoGonna see if I can implement https://chiptune.app https://chiptune.app in an actual TUI with this.
- wewewedxfgdf 7mo agoI'd have liked a lot more screenshots on the front page of the outcomes.
- luzejian 7mo agoThe 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.
- luzejian 7mo agoWhat 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.
- hacker_homie 7mo agoPeople really want to bring back Visual Basic.
- lagniappe 7mo agoComments in this one are embarrassing. Some of you will find a way to complain about anything.
- codingjinxx 7mo agoReads the landing page, looks at pretty pictures - Ah this is cool idea, i wonder how it works? "Code export is not functional yet" - Ah it doesn't.