10 ms·

Why TUIs are back

• schmorptron 6mo ago
  I think part of it is also that we're able to still LARP as full developers of complex systems while vibe coding by seeing an interface that makes us look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times
  • dbish 6mo ago
    I’m relatively certain it’s just this at the end of the day. Everything I see people doing in their custom built TUIs or claude/codex CLI can be done, likely even easier, in a simplified IDE or easier to scan UI, but it feels nice/cool/cyberpunk/work-like to look like you’re doing more. Everyone will have a “reasonable” explanation though for why they have to stay in the terminal even when they aren’t really coding anymore and it wouldn’t be hard to have a window next to your terminal if you really have to, but live and let live. Whatever makes you happy as be all become managers. I too like a cyberpunk interface even if it’s last the need :)
    • allthetime 6mo ago
      It is much easier to quickly generate a usable tui for simple monitoring and management than a usable gui. Go + lipgloss + bubble tea and a single prompt will give you whatever you need in a minute or two - much faster to compile and no platform specific issues. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window
      • tempaccount5050 6mo ago
        Not anymore it isn't. "Claude, make this a web app".
        • allthetime 6mo ago
          Just what I need! A bloated react app to manage my systemd units
          • tempaccount5050 6mo ago
            So just tell it html only if you want.
            • sophiabits 6mo ago
              A browser is OOM more expensive to run than a terminal app, regardless of what you're running inside said browser
              • eVeechu7 6mo ago
                Is that because they are much more likely to pay the ultimate price at the hands of the OOM killer?
              • vineyardmike 6mo ago
                I've literally never met anyone in real life who used a computer that didn't already have a browser running 24/7
            • allthetime 6mo ago
              How does the browser interact with the os? A tui exe has direct access. With “only html” now we need a server of some kind. How is multiple layers and running processes superior to a thin terminal based wrapper around the relevant io? That said, obviously it depends on the use case. I’m not going to make a tui to interact with locations on a map - a web app makes a lot of sense in that case. But something like lazydocker makes sense more sense as a light terminal based program
          • logicprog 6mo ago
            Just use something like Tk or wxWidgets.
      • majormajor 6mo ago
        > I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window I do a lot of work in the terminal and that's exactly why I'd rather have other windows to the side so that my terminal can stay exactly focused on what I'm doing there. Those other windows might also be terminals, but I have a big screen, and I want to make use of it to see things all at once. A GUI gives far more flexibility for arranging those multiple views. I've sat with coworkers taking two to twelve keystrokes to flip between things that I just have side by side in separate IDE windows, browser windows, or tabs... or can switch between with a single click instead of those keystrokes.
        • kajman 6mo ago
          Window managers are more flexible than multiplexers, but I also think there's a higher floor of effort juggling multiple separate GUI programs than going between tabs and panes in a terminal emulator. Multi-monitor terminal juggling also probably loses out to GUIs, though for me it's usually IDE or Browser on one and multiplexer on the other. One big zellij session connected to multiple terminal emulators is probably the best way I could think to handle that.
          • rmunn 6mo ago
            > a higher floor of effort juggling multiple separate GUI programs than going between tabs and panes in a terminal emulator. Depends very much on your window manager. Tiling window managers such as Hyprland let you open multiple windows and it will automatically arrange them side-by-side. Want one of them to be 60% and the other 40%? No problem, there's a keyboard shortcut (configurable) for that. Have four windows open in a grid arrangement and want to switch between them? Just slide the mouse, no clicking needed so the movement can be as rough and imprecise as you want, OR if you don't want to take your hands off the keyboard then SUPER+arrow keys (also configurable) will move the focus to the next window in that direction. (And if you are in focus-follows-mouse mode then it also moves your mouse cursor to be in the middle of the focused window, so you won't lose window focus by accidentally bumping your mouse and moving it one pixel). Keyboard shortcuts for maximizing and un-maximizing windows, for throwing them onto other workspaces and switching between workspaces... I throw windows around my screen all the time, and rarely take my hands off the keyboard to do it. It's the fastest, most flow-like window manager experience I've found yet.
      • dbish 6mo ago
        It’s very easy to do the same thing in a variety of ways and simple guis are basically solved by Claude/codex for almost anything.
      • pocksuppet 6mo ago
        This used to not be the case - we've regressed. In the distant past you could just drag a couple of widgets onto a form and update them from a timer.
      • wild_egg 6mo ago
        Can get a GUI with the same prompt if you tell it to use TCL/tk instead of Go + Charm stuff
    • mr_mitm 6mo ago
      TUIs already increased in popularity before agents became a thing. The low latency, the ease of remoting and the limited screen real estate which forces the developer to carefully design the interface are genuine advantages. I've been using mutt, vim, tig, tmux, newsboat, etc for over a decade at this point, and the cyberpunk feeling faded quickly.
      • setr 6mo ago
        The low latency and instant startup is by far the primary value add imo. Nothing else comes close. The inherent lack of UI bloat is an added bonus.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • ghusto 6mo ago
      It isn't, at least for me. I choose between GUI and terminal apps based on which one is easies. Sometimes the "easy" option really isn't easy at all.
    • regexorcist 6mo ago
      No it can never be the same. The terminal is about not having to switch from the keyboard. My entire workflow is tmux panes with different TUIs and terminals. Not to mention performance, with a neovim IDE you may have tens of them open in different panes for example. I wouldn't try that with VSCode.
      • logicprog 6mo ago
        You can make even lighter weight and just as keyboard driven GUIs. The only downside, as you say, is them not integrating with Tmux.
        • regexorcist 6mo ago
          Projects like opencode are making the distinction between GUI and TUI almost meaningless. And that "only" downside is a massive, deal-breaking one. At this point I only have a browser besides the terminal, and I can see that going away soon for the most part thanks to LLMs.
    • james_marks 6mo ago
      Hot take: TUI’s default to providing utility, GUI’s are prone to extra style/bloat. Obviously both are capable of the other. The vanilla HTML styles look bare, so you have do _something_. TUI’s look sort of cool in their simplest form.
      • keyringlight 6mo ago
        It's an aspect I've wondered about, constraints do make you consider what's essential. For example in btop (screenshot in the article) the graphs are rendered with dots at low resolution, if there was another version where those graphs were full resolution is it telling you meaningfully more?
        • rmunn 6mo ago
          Since the dots in btop's rendering are using the Braille characters, meaning you get six dots in the space that would be taken up by one alphanumeric character, the resolution on those dots is surprisingly high. A maximized terminal on my screen is size 316x86, so that's 316×2 x 86×3 = 632x258 of "Braille dot resolution" (a term I just made up) available for the graphs. Sure, that's lower than the 2560x1600 pixel resolution of my screen, but you're entirely right to ask "Does that really matter?" The graph would be smoother with about 4x more horizontal pixels and 6x more vertical pixels to work with, but I doubt I would glean any more information at first glance.
    • xiaoyu2006 6mo ago
      But GUIs are hard to built - mainly because of tech debts around all three major platforms. But nontheless displaying graphics is harder than outputting control chars.
      • smackeyacky 6mo ago
        This is a recent development. VB6 could have you roll a GUI interface in minutes, so even trivial tasks could have a GUI. The tools for CDE on Unices were arguably even better but CDE never really got any momentum. That it’s tough to put together a GUI now is definitely a regression and Microsoft shooting themselves in the feet regularly over the last 25 years is squarely to blame.
      • PunchyHamster 6mo ago
        You could whip up decently usable UI in Delphi far quicker than similar one in any TUI framework. The problem is that world went away from that and into HTML/CSS/JS/DOM mess that makes simple UI things hard and complex UI things slow and/or hard, on top of the bloat.
    • jbvlkt 6mo ago
      [dead]
  • koliber 6mo ago
    Bad UI plagued software development since ages immortal. The reason is not AI. Good UI design is a skill (or art?) and not an afterthought. But most people do not see it that way and that is why things are the way they are.
    • exe34 6mo ago
      > since ages immortal since time immemorial?
      • flir 6mo ago
        3rd Sept 1189. Anything after that is time memorial I guess.
        • derektank 6mo ago
          [dead]
    • PunchyHamster 6mo ago
      No, it's just misaligned incentives. Companies make UI/UX to prioritise first 30 minutes of the experience, to keep user using it long enough that they stick with it. Not the 8h/day work the UI will get when a tool become pillar of your work.
  • bartread 6mo ago
    > look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times I feel seen. I also think there’s a certain element of reacting against absolutely everything becoming a bloated electron app. I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.
    • Suro 6mo ago
      Considering the insane memory consumption of claude code running in my terminal, electron was never really the problem, bad software was the culprit all along.
      • onemoresoop 6mo ago
        Can’t say that electron does not encourage bad software, quite the opposite
        • treyd 6mo ago
          It's an example of bad code that further encourages more bad code.
      • Redster 6mo ago
        Always has been.
      • fasterik 6mo ago
        The culprit is using web technologies where they don't belong, which Electron is also guilty of. Claude Code is 400k lines of JavaScript for a TUI where a sane implementation in C would be two orders of magnitude less code.
      • jorvi 6mo ago
        Yup. VSCode is really fast and memory-frugal for an Electron application of that complexity. Likewise, Gnome has proven that you can write entire UIs in Javascript and have them be quite performant. Electron (well, Node is a big sub-culprit) and Javascript in general just make it really easy to create a slow, bloated application.
  • dlivingston 6mo ago
    I mean, I guess there's that novelty for the first few years of your career. I've been doing this a decade. I don't care about looking and feeling like a l33t h4xx0r and I doubt my peers do either. TUIs just solve the right problems in the same world we're already working in - the terminal. That they're fast to launch and terminals have modern features like rich color and mouse support just adds to that.
  • sillysaurusx 6mo ago
    I’ve been running Claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions. It’s so nice that I’m not sure I can go back. Pressing continue 15 times is surprisingly heavy, but you don’t notice till you don’t have to do it anymore.
    • ne8il 6mo ago
      I would try switching to Auto Mode which is their own recommendation as a safer alternative to that but still avoids needing to confirm actions endlessly: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-auto-mode https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-auto-mode
      • sillysaurusx 6mo ago
        I’d love to. It’s not available to Claude Pro nor Claude Max subscribers. Eventually I got fed up with waiting and just turned off permissions.
        • isityettime 6mo ago
          Try an external sandboxing tool. When you need to adjust the sandbox, close the agent, launch it with the new params, and resume the session. It doesn't take long to arrive at a stable configuration; for me it's mostly about rw access to the CWD, read access to other local repos, and access to Nix. Other than that I can just use YOLO modes and not sweat it. I briefly evaluated a bunch (had an LLM make a list of those that satisfied some basic criteria, then visited READMEs and websites) and chose nono. No regrets: https://nono.sh/ https://nono.sh/
          • chrisweekly 6mo ago
            Cool, 1st I've heard of nono.sh. FWIW I've been happy w smolmachines microvms.
            • isityettime 6mo ago
  • yokoprime 6mo ago
    Having worked with development since the early 2000s, I think its great that development has become more accessible and I dont particularly like that the old guard tries to gate-keep the idea of "being a developer". Being an engineer I feel requires more credentials, it always has. But if you feel like you're a developer, all the more power to you!
  • the__alchemist 6mo ago
    FYI this is why I still use Vim sometimes. I am OOM more productive in JetBrains, but sometimes I have to feel like Hiro Protagonist. So, Vim it is.
    • jbvlkt 6mo ago
      I have just combined those together. I use astronvim as main editor but when I need IDE I switch to Idea. I use ideavim with configuration as close as possible to astronvim. So text editing is the same for me in both programs. Modal editors are still great and they can do a lot of work that looks like magic for AI era trained developers.
    • arcanemachiner 6mo ago
      Sometimes I swear that people are just making up acronyms here to troll people. I assume you mean "orders of magnitude" and not "out of memory". I have never seen the former used as an acronym before, let alone without some kind of contextual clue. (In typical Baader-Meinhof fashion, I'm sure I'll see it again in the next 24 hours...)
      • lucketone 6mo ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001905
      • the__alchemist 6mo ago
        Nailed it!
      • Narishma 5mo ago
        > I assume you mean "orders of magnitude" and not "out of memory". I mean they mentioned Jetbrains, it could be either.
    • Cpoll 6mo ago
      Did Hiro even use a keyboard? I remember everything was VR in Snow Crash. I, of course, pretend I'm Zero Cool.
  • rubslopes 6mo ago
    I thought that that was the case for me, but then I tried using Claude Code through the desktop app last week and it was so bad. Slow, glitchy... I went back to the TUI in no time.
  • zer0zzz 6mo ago
    Can it be much more simple of a reason and that tuis fit into many of our existing tmux based work flows?
  • dnnddidiej 6mo ago
    I associate CLI prompt and typing 100wpm and lots of scrolling logs with l33t, but claude code is more 1992 DOS program vibes.
    • bee_rider 6mo ago
      CLI makes a lot more sense than TUI to me. A TUI program feels like a new thing to learn, a CLI program is just a new tool in my toolbox. I can see some point to having an auto-updating dashboard or the like, though.
  • walrus01 6mo ago
    "Claude, write a set of scripts using bash and python that trade this $10,000 on S&P 500 listed stocks until it reaches 5 million, make no mistakes"
  • deadbabe 6mo ago
    I don’t understand why developers aren’t just learning to use CLIs and be comfortable with terminals even without cute little interfaces. Are people really that put off by seeing some text on a screen and nothing more? Is tmux that difficult to learn?
  • sghiassy 6mo ago
    Thank you for this comment. As a principal engineer in FAANG, this the correct answer
  • dominotw 6mo ago
    lol most depressing comment of the day
• abhinavsharma 6mo ago
  To me it's just that they're great for people who live in a terminal - No distractions from visual content - Extreme efficiency with keyboard - AIs can code them up quickly. It used to be a total pain
  • nrmitchi 6mo ago
    > - AIs can code them up quickly. It used to be a total pain As far my opinion goes, this is biggest (and really only) reason.
  • mbreese 6mo ago
    I think the corollary to this is that there are more people comfortable with living in a terminal. TUIs are more common now that there is an increased audience for them.
  • estimator7292 6mo ago
    There's nowhere in a TUI to add oceans of padding for a ""sleek"" and ""modern"" look. There's very very little that a product manager can ""streamline"" in 80 columns of text.
    • itsboring 6mo ago
      I like TUIs for a lot of reasons, but this one might be the biggest.
• slopinthebag 6mo ago
  I think TUI's are popular because they're easier to make than a GUI. They are much more constrained. A TUI is basically a wire frame with some colours, whereas with a GUI the wireframe is only the first step.
  • mbreese 6mo ago
    Are you sure about that? Most GUI toolkits have things so wired up that it’s trivial to get a small app running. The point is to get a dev up and running as quickly as possible (even if there is a lot of magic involved). If you’re okay with the defaults, it ca be very quick to get a GUI up and running. In contrast, most TUI toolkits generally require the developer to wire things up manually. Maximum developer flexibility, but with a decent learning curve. Having an LLM available to handle the initial wiring definitely speeds things up. I know I had a few long lasting bugs with a TUI I wrote years ago that Claude was able to find the fix for pretty quickly. These were bugs that weren’t obvious to me, partially due to the arcane nature of working within a TUI.
    • slopinthebag 6mo ago
      Idk, it's pretty trivial to set up a TUI with bubbletea or ratatui, and I assume other languages have similar libraries.
• debarshri 6mo ago
  It was always there. k9s for instance, it started getting noticed recently. With coding agents, it is even easier to build.
• droidjj 6mo ago
  > The most popular claim is the memory consumption, which to be fair has been decreasing over the last decade, but my main complaint (as I usually drive a 64GB RAM MacBook Pro) is the lack of visual consistency and lack of keyboard-driven workflows. Lucky you. I avoid electron apps because I'm limping along with 16gb.
• paddy_m 6mo ago
  I think another factor is that people are rejecting the rounded corners and excessive padding of modern web design, you can't do that in a TUI, so you don't have a designer or standard practice encouraging you to do it. As implemented TUIs have greater information density than GUIs. Make no mistake though, TUIs are a decided step backwards from GUIs. Everything that you can express via text, you can also do in a text area on a GUI app.
• lispisok 6mo ago
  My cynical take why TUIs are back is because people operating in the terminal became a signal that you were competent and once people figured that out everybody started doing it. The reason people were operating in the terminal is lost of them but hey it makes you look like a 1337 hacker. It's the same thing with side projects of past decades. People who had side projects cared about the craft for more than a paycheck and tended to be more competent. Then every person just trying to land a job suddenly had "side projects". Gotta have those green squares on github.
  • metaltyphoon 6mo ago
    > My cynical take why TUIs are back is because people operating in the terminal became a signal that you were competent and once people figured that out everybody started doing it Are you saying GUI "the real deal"?
• herrherrmann 6mo ago
  There are a lot of points in there that are just generally bad in modern applications – e.g. UI inconsistencies, lack of automation and general configurability (shared ways to handle windows, layouts, keyboard shortcuts, etc.). I think it’s fair to say these things are just hugely lacking in modern operating systems. Linux might come close, but only with lots of tinkering. macOS is clearly lost and degrading now, and Windows was never close to having these qualities. I don’t know if TUIs will be the answer, but it’s an interesting development!
  • GoblinSlayer 6mo ago
    Windows has a hot key control for input and display of keyboard shortcuts https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/hot-key-controls https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/hot...
• nickjj 6mo ago
  I do like CLI tools and TUIs but in the article it mentions Gnome style apps don't fit the look. That sounds like a limitation of Omarchy. It's not too bad to theme GTK apps and have them all look a consistent way. For example I use Tokyonight Moon and Gruvbox and they both have GTK themes that look great for Firefox, Thunar, GIMP, LibreOffice and more. I don't use Omarchy but here's a few screenshots https://x.com/nickjanetakis/status/2037125261657883061/photo/1 https://x.com/nickjanetakis/status/2037125261657883061/photo.... Nothing fancy was done on my end, just installed the specific GTK themes. They even support live reloading because GTK's tooling supports it, my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles handle all of it for you. I still prefer TUIs but you can have nice looking GUI apps for when you want them.
  • d3Xt3r 6mo ago
    Those apps you mentioned are not your typical modern GTK4/libadwaita apps, so naturally you can theme them. It's the GTK4 apps - and ones which use libadwaita specifically - that cause grief. - Firefox: Uses its own custom rendering engine but interfaces with GTK3. It respects standard GTK3 themes. - Thunar: Uses GTK3 - GIMP: Since v3.0, they now use GTK3 - LibreOffice: Uses its own visual framework (VCL) but has a GTK3 plugin to draw its window frame and menus, and it also respects the system theme. None of these use libadwaita, let alone GTK4, so they're not good examples unfortunately.
    • nickjj 6mo ago
      > so they're not good examples unfortunately They're some of the most popular GTK apps available. They seems like a good example to me. The themes I'm using are compatible with GTK4 apps too. I use niri which suggests installing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome which comes with Nautilus which is a GTK4 app. It's perfectly themed just like the GTK3 apps.
• shevy-java 6mo ago
  One huge advantage that the commandline + TUIs have is ... speed. I get more things done, in most cases, than via a GUI. In a way a TUI is a GUI of course, but with the focus on keyboard use and inputting instructions/commands. Most GUIs seem to be centered around keyboard AND mouse and then try to make things convenient here for those operations, such as drag-and-drop via the mouse.
• beej71 6mo ago
  The best thing about TUIs is that they're so fast. They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast. There's a learning curve for the bazillion hotkeys, because all it is is hot keys, but when you have it, you just fly. I've been reverting more and more: mutt (mail), newsboat (RSS), amfora (gemini protocol), gurk (Signal), chawan (web), and even trn (Usenet). My RAM usage is tiny. Everything is quick. GUIs should take a page from the TUI playbook and consider making the app keyboard-first. Nothing is more frustrating than a missing hotkey.
  • fg137 6mo ago
    Eh... no. Never underestimate people's ability to make software bloated and slow. You haven't spent enough time with Claude Code, Gemini CLI I guess.
    • beej71 6mo ago
      Oh, I've definitely seen the results. :) But it's nice when people don't do that.
  • breuleux 6mo ago
    > They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast. I don't know about that. The Gemini TUI takes like four full seconds to start on my machine. I have no idea what the hell it's doing. A lot of the fancy new TUIs that are coming on the crest of the current fad are hot garbage. I hate them.
    • beej71 6mo ago
      Claude Code is 600 Kloc... insanity. It's definitely possible to write crap TUIs.
  • PunchyHamster 6mo ago
    GUIs are being developed for first 30 minutes of use. It seems that barely anyone thinks about what GUI should like for app you use hours at a time for days at end. About only software that's half decent for it are IDEs (and probably some industry-specific niche software I'm ignorant of)
• refulgentis 6mo ago
  TL;DR, not from the article: Because Claude Code was a small team experiment done months after Claude Sonnet 3.7 had support for file editing; a bunch of companies had to fast follow; and the path of least resistance / collaborative work between PM and dev and design is copying, and companies are companies, they prefer money and competition over patiently waiting for X00 people to decide on a vision and deliver it. I think it's important to note this because it's not great. Either I'm having a fever dream, or, someone will GUI this stuff and it'll be a gamechanger.
• gorjusborg 6mo ago
  The real reason TUIs are back is not one reason, but a host of reasons. The biggest current reason is fashion. Tools like Claude Code did it, and while they actually had good reasons to run in the terminal, the tools' popularity and wildly different look, especially to non-terminal-native users became a signal of some positive sort. I don't believe that any of the rationale posed in the article is a popular reason developers are using.
  • onemoresoop 6mo ago
    Fashion is a big driver for sure but TUIs do have advantages over GUIs that are real, especially for powerusers.
• ohnei 6mo ago
  The TUIs I've looked at seem to be largely NPM dependent? Bizarre that agents apparently don't have time to rewrite themselves in something that isn't a security tire fire. It kind of makes me assume that all this agents taking over stuff is from people working at garbage-pivot-garbage startups that don't really have to worry about any consequences but not being fast enough.
  • nothinkjustai 6mo ago
    Yeah that’s the thing, pretty much all the people who are really into ai for everything are JavaScript/Typescript developers, usually working at startups, and often in the AI field.
    • llbbdd 6mo ago
      AI is only good at the work I'm not paid to do
  • allthetime 6mo ago
    Go + Lipgloss + Bubbletea is by far the most robust and performant stack for building (and or generating) aesthetic and usable TUIs. Excellent DX. No npm necessary
    • MarsIronPI 6mo ago
      Is the Go ecosystem really that much better? As an outsider it looks like there's a fair amount of library use, more than I'd like.
      • polski-g 6mo ago
        Check out the Crush agent harness. It's very impressive.
        • MarsIronPI 6mo ago
          Impressively many dependencies? I estimate about 75-125 in the dependency tree, including multiple versions of the same package. Now compare to something written in e.g. C: such a program might have 2 dependencies: libcurl and ncurses.
• bellowsgulch 6mo ago
  A reverse shibboleth for someone who does zero professional design work is taking a screenshot of differing corner radii in macOS. Don’t fall for this.
  • ricardobeat 6mo ago
    Why? All the great designers I've worked with would have shivers shooting up their spine after looking at that screenshot.
• fithisux 6mo ago
  Next one is the NoJS movement and Gemini or even Gopher spaces. JS literally destroyed the software landscape. All the bad practices advertised as best.
• fg137 6mo ago
  Only for software engineers who are already familiar with terminals. Most non tech people I know and in my company absolutely hate TUI. Even a fraction of software developers who spend most their time outside terminals (especially those that are on Windows and/or use specialized tools/IDEs) prefer to avoid TUIs as well.
  • zozbot234 6mo ago
    Many "non-technical" folks who have interacted with virtual 3270 terminals for all sorts of mission critical tasks would disagree sharply with that assessment. And those are essentially TUIs.
    • fg137 6mo ago
      Do they use it for generic computing stuff, like, reading and replying to emails, or specific tasks?
      • zozbot234 6mo ago
        Yup.
  • Jach 6mo ago
    And for those of us devs, they never really went anywhere. vim was the most popular editor on HN 15, 10 years ago, still very popular 5 years ago, still popular today.. and that's just an editor, all the other tools like top and its descendents never went away.. I'll believe "TUIs are back" or in some kind of uprise when I notice my non-developer friends and family using them for anything. The most dominant UI today is the mobile app, that's not changing. Limited to professional use (i.e. doing work for someone) and not all use, TUIs aren't touching either web apps or native GUIs either.
• tptacek 6mo ago
  The tide is going to turn on this in the second half of 2026. There have always been nerds who just love TUIs, and still read their email in Mutt. But I think the subtext of this article is right, that TUIs are back because of how much of a pain UI development is. But that's changed drastically in the last few months. I spent the weekend doing SwiftUI stuff with Claude, with a lot of success. It's going to get much easier to ship fast, solid, native UIs for things, and native UI is both very fun to build and also attractive to ordinary users. (Fun green field for doing interesting UI work: do native UI for remote server stuff, like an htop UI that uses some dialect of SSH to fetch remote data.) I think modern TUIs are a blip. A big, important blip. But a blip. The age of the Orc is over. The time of the Human Interface Guideline has come.
  • dlivingston 6mo ago
    That still doesn't address the root of the problem, which is that TUIs and Electron apps are write-once, run-anywhere, while native GUI dev is insanely fragmented. I mean, I guess that's more or less just a summary of the blog post, but it's true. And it will remain true until the fragmentation ends, and the fragmentation won't end until Microsoft gets its act together and ships their version of SwiftUI so that some sort of abstraction layer over SwiftUI/GTK/MsftUI can be created. And since Microsoft will almost certainly never get its act together, the problem will remain. In other words, not a blip. The UIs of the present and future will all be Electron apps and TUIs.
    • Ekaros 6mo ago
      Why not instead have Linux just run Win32 applications?
      • dlivingston 6mo ago
        That's really not a solution. You're not targeting the host OS for that, which instantly kills that approach for everything other than "we need this to run on Linux and don't care how." You're shipping all of WINE with it. You're sticking out like a sore thumb with Win32 widgets next to the rest of your GTK apps. Etc etc etc.
• giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  Because nobody is investing in native UI development. Electron is proof that if there were a simple to use GUI stack that companies would adopt it.
  • bbkane 6mo ago
    Contrary to what the article says ("but Google gave up on the project before a real product was launched"), I think Flutter work continues and adoption is increasing
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • airstrike 6mo ago
      I don't really want Dart tbh
      • danpalmer 6mo ago
        I dislike Dart, but it does work really well for Flutter. I think if you treat it as a Flutter DSL it's easier to put up with.
    • serial_dev 6mo ago
      The article (as I read it) says that Google gave up on the new operating system (where Flutter would have been the default UI toolkit). I’m not sure if Google actually already gave up on Fuchsia, I’d be surprised if the work actually stopped, but it’s clear now that it will not be a panacea and if it will ever get released and gets some traction, it’s still like a decade away from becoming a major OS.
      • mghackerlady 6mo ago
        They laid off most of the people on the Fuchsia team so it isn't getting as much work, but Fuchsia is used on their nest stuff iirc
    • 5mo ago
• cassepipe 6mo ago
  > The hardcore, moved to vim or emacs, trading immediate feedback and higher usability for the steepest learning curve I’ve seen The only hard part about vim is to be forced to strecth the finger up to Escape for what is essentially the most essential function in a modal editor: Going back to command mode. The ideal workflow is do a quick edit and go back to command ("normal") mode instantly. The fact that Escape is used is a historical artifact that needs to be called out. So just remap CapsLock to escape, it system-wide, it's not that hard and it's nice to have Escape there generally. In Linux and MacOS it's just a GUI setting away and in windows you just have to edit (create?) a registry key. Can be done on any machine under a minute. Apart from that I don't see where the learning curve is since you can just start with the basics from vim-tutor and look up for more when you feel you're spending too much time on something. I already felt faster than in any other editor when I just knew the basics. The real problem of vim is that you get used to modal editing very quickly and it feels like the stone age when you don't have it.
  • mr_mitm 6mo ago
    Unfortunately, remapping escape to caps lock can lead to serious friction if you have to work with different laptops a lot, like I do. The muscle memory gets in the way a lot.
    • thayne 6mo ago
      If only keyboard makers would just always put escape there.
      • wtetzner 6mo ago
        It should always be "hold for control" and "tap for esc".
    • lucasoshiro 6mo ago
      I always remap Caps Lock to Ctrl. I understand that Caps Lock needed to be next to Shift in typewriters, but in computers it seems like it is wasting a key in the home row for only be used sometimes for screaming (which can be done by holding shift...)
• b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
  the current AI summer has been great for us dorks that prefer TUI/console interfaces. I hope it all sticks around with the inevitable cool-down in LLM hype.
• j45 6mo ago
  They were never really gone, just maybe introduced to a new audience a little more lately which is great.
• TacticalCoder 6mo ago
  I've got a bit of a different on it... It's because TUIs do lend themselves better to automation (it's been mentioned in the thread) and, most importantly, it's because there's less cognitive dissonance between a TUI and how it typically operates and... The way AIs are using command line tools / the terminal (or a REPL, for those using agents hooked to a REPL). In a way AI agents are validating what us old-timers always knew: the CLI and TUIs is the most powerful way. And AI tools didn't choose the most common dev environment: devs using fat IDEs (and btw I was already using IntelliJ IDEA back when some people were still arguing NetBeans was better than IntelliJ) are way more common than those piping Unix commands to achieve even simple tasks. Instead AI tools did choose the most powerful way to work: and that's piping terminal commands and SSH/tmux/TUIs. When the tool itself, like Claude Code CLI, is immediately showing the outputs of piped Unix commands and allowing to run commands from a prompt and is, itself, a TUI, it's validating that it's an extremely powerful way to work. A Claude Code CLI (or similar) TUI in a tmux session is something quite powerful. Then you combine that with the fact that techs like LSP and tree-sitter did at least partially commodotize the IDE and suddenly TUIs (or things very close to it, like GUI Emacs: which can do graphics but is still mostly used as a TUI tool) do look very appealing. Magit is considered by many --even non Emacs user-- as the best Git interface ever. It's text, text and more text. My life is terminals (text), Git and Magit (text), Emacs (GUI but basically text), SSH (text), tmux (text), many text things I forgot and now TUI harnesses. If you're modelizing in Blender or editing movies or creating movies, a GUI makes sense. But if you write code, which is text, all you need is text, text and more text. TUIs are making a comeback because it is all text and AI agents are proof of that.
• personjerry 6mo ago
  > TUIs are Back Citation needed?
• jrm4 6mo ago
  Nothing inherently special or even superior about TUIs, I think this very simply just speaks to "what happened" which is the fragmentation of the GUI space over the course of Microsoft v Apple v Linux v "The Web." Seems like it could have gone differently. Feels like the time could be ripe for something like a "declarative gui spec."
• ngruhn 6mo ago
  I think the come back is completely driven by Claude Code. Claude Code is a TUI, Claude Code is successful, therefore let's make everything a TUI! I'm pretty sure the success has nothing to do with the TUI though. I personally enjoy it a lot but the productivity boast doesn't come from avoiding the mouse.
  • post-it 6mo ago
    It is driven by Claude Code, not because it's a TUI but because you can paste a bad TUI directly into CC and tell it to intuit what to fix, whereas uploading a screenshot is more cumbersome and less likely to be parsed correctly.
  • rossant 6mo ago
    I think TUIs have started to become popular again a few years ago, before Claude Code was released?
• krelas 6mo ago
  Hate to be this guy but it’s Xerox PARC, not Park.
  • furyofantares 6mo ago
    That and "loosing", but I gotta admit, I suddenly love typos and mistakes like this letting me quickly know the post wasn't fed through an LLM.
    • alcidesfonseca 6mo ago
      Fixed both issues. Thanks!
• qudat 6mo ago
  I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code, everything else is background noise compared to it. What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required. It's a major reason why I enjoy hacking on https://pico.sh https://pico.sh -- deploying the TUI requires zero user involvement.
  • _jackdk_ 6mo ago
    I don't think that's true, because it appears to me that the upswing in new TUI programs predates Claude Code's takeoff.
    • criley2 6mo ago
      Claude Code uses Ink, a react library in javascript for UI. The upswing is probably stuff like this making it super easy to write a TUI.
      • _jackdk_ 6mo ago
        What a fascinating modern age we live in.
        • deleted 6mo ago
          [deleted]
      • deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      • rahen 6mo ago
        Ink is the Electron of text-based apps. I tried OpenCode out of curiosity, it routinely used hundreds of megabytes of memory. I'll stick with Emacs as my TUI platform of choice, especially for tool-assisted development.
    • heavyset_go 6mo ago
• monkeydust 6mo ago
  Somewhat ironic is that people are using them to create generic web apps like they are going out of fashion.
• frou_dh 6mo ago
  There's something disgusting about the use of characters for graphs/charts on a bitmapped monitor. Trust nerds to find a way to make stuff ugly!
• manyatoms 6mo ago
  TUIs are back because the web got too bloated.
  • dvhh 6mo ago
    And desktop app are tuning into bloated website
• osaariki 6mo ago
  TUIs are great for low friction remote work. I do a lot of data processing work on remote VMs with a mix of interactive debugging/eyeballing and bulk jobs. TUIs are a great fit for the sorts of tools I build to support this work. The other UI paradigm I end up reaching for is locally hosted web UIs, as models are really good at one-shotting HTML reports with graphs and tables. Inside VS code those get automatically tunneled to the local machine.
  • rmunn 6mo ago
    This nails it. The fact that the app interface looks exactly the same whether it's running locally or in an SSH session means I don't have to learn it twice. And while some GUI apps (VS Code for example) can be run remotely and still look the same, it takes a certain amount of ceremony to set that up. And worse, that ceremony has to be done for each app and is different for each app. Running TUI apps over SSH isn't ceremony-less either — you have to set up SSH keys and copy your public key over into the remote end's authorized_keys file — but it's ceremony that you would have already had to do anyway to get access to the remote computer in the first place. And once that ceremony is done, you can now run any TUI (that the remote computer has installed) remotely without any more ceremony.
• wonderwhyer 6mo ago
  [dead]
• pelcg 6mo ago
  There are a lot of TUIs in existence worth looking at if one is interested or curious about them [0], [1], [2] [0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis [1] https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ [2] https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix Even before Claude Code, I always see htop as the prime example of a good TUI.
• moomin 6mo ago
  Using Claude has highlighted, for me, a number of issues with terminal apps like Claude Code. You can’t easily see the status of lots of instances, you can’t easily search for instances, you can’t get one instance to start another instance or send a message from one instance to another and, of course, if you make a slightly mistake in coding a full screen app, you get screen corruption.
  • rmunn 6mo ago
    > if you make a slightly mistake in coding a full screen app, you get screen corruption. HOW? The TUI library should handle everything for you. So HOW do... Wait. Did Claude vibe-code up its own set of TUI routines instead of using a library?
• sombragris 6mo ago
  I fully agree about the overall downward trend in quality and efficiency of GUI apps, but I also think there's an important factor in the rise of TUI apps: People now have access to good terminal emulators. Back in the day, you had cmd.exe in Windows. Now you have a plethora of Linux/Unix terminal emulators, Terminal.app in MacOS, and Windows Terminal in Windows 10/11. These are quite capable applications able to render good, complex text-based interfaces.
• kjuulh 6mo ago
  I am conflicted on tuis they are nice, convenient and I dig the aestetic. But they're often not composeable. So even if they're there they dont feel native to the terminal. It is just an app in the terminal and that is okay, but you lose some of the terminal magic
• _jackdk_ 6mo ago
  The diagnosis for GNU/Linux is better than I expected but I think is still incomplete. Yes, you have two major toolkits (GTK+ and Qt) and many minor ones (most of which wrap one of the majors). Qt is proprietary but also available under a free software licence, but what if you don't want that that complexity? It feels like modern GTK+ is less of a cross-platform toolkit and more of a runtime layer for libaidwaita and the GNOME stack. So if you don't want to conform to GNOME's UI conventions, it's not clear where else to go. Also, the explosion of new languages in recent years means having to write a new set of FFI wrappers around existing libraries, and it's easier to make an idiomatic library for TUI development than wrap all of GTK+ or Qt.
  • zozbot234 6mo ago
    The xfce folks are keeping GTK+ 3.x around, mostly for its advanced theming support. Isn't that quite enough?
    • _jackdk_ 6mo ago
      I didn't realise. That's good news. Whether it's enough, I don't know the UI space well enough to say.
  • Pay08 6mo ago
    Qt's license really isn't hard to figure out. If it's free software, you use the free software license. If it's propietary/commercial, you use the propietary license.
    • okanat 6mo ago
      You can also use most of the core components (labels, buttons, grid views, image and media players) with LGPL in commercial apps. Only the more complex and more value-adding components like charts are GPL.
  • GoblinSlayer 6mo ago
    I wrote bindings for gtk, it's 16kb of text. I imagine riir of curses will be much more mork.
• esafak 6mo ago
  Because LLMs operate on text, and their purveyors claim natural language interfaces are the best thing since sliced bread, since that's what they sell.
• gbin 6mo ago
  I don't think it is surprising. Loading entire chrome processes for simple super laggy UIs is just unbearable. TUI are snappy, accessible over ssh, small screen friendly, easily embeddable in zellij or other multiplexers, easy to copy paste from... Amazing.
• mirekrusin 6mo ago
  servo was recently published on crates – it has potential of becoming new standard; electron model proved to work very well the only downside is monstrous memory usage.
  • GoblinSlayer 6mo ago
    It's well known how it works. If web browser is efficient, it just invites webdevs to spend all the extra resources until it's slow again. Wait for AI assisted mouse cursor.
• pjmlp 6mo ago
  Because now we have a young generation nostalgic of their parents experience in the 1980-90's, and that includes the TUI experiences we were stuck with back in the day.
• try-working 6mo ago
  The only reason CLIs and TUIs "came back" is because we're still in the early stages of this paradigm, things are moving fast and building a strong GUI UX takes just as much time as building out the backend functionality. So CLI and TUIs are used because they save time, skips the need for building a time consuming GUI. Also building UI is hard.
• adamnemecek 6mo ago
  They are back because modern languages (Rust, Go) have made it pretty straight forward to build them. Ratatui and such allow you to write a TUI really quickly without needing to deal with VT100 arcana.
• dostick 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• nharada 6mo ago
  VB6 was the peak of desktop GUI app development change my mind
  • timbit42 5mo ago
    Delphi.
• arjie 6mo ago
  I make some things GUIs and some things TUIs. The TUIs are easier to work with Claude Code and Codex. We can co-work on many things together because the LLM harness reads TUIs very fast. You can do it with GUIs but that's much slower, and maintaining two separate interfaces into these things isn't worth the trouble.
• burnto 6mo ago
  I think there’s also perhaps an organizational explanation. A reasonable TUI can be built without any design or frontend people even looped in. Collaboration and coordination tend to slow down processes and flatten outputs.
• nickdothutton 6mo ago
  My terminal has not been ensh*ttified. I used the Internet for work, for knowledge, more than I use it for entertainment. One of the reasons I like TUIs.
• dzonga 6mo ago
  ahh the classic - see one anecdote - then create a narrative that the world is changing. if TUIs were truly back - as DHH would like you to believe - his money maker - Basecamp - would be available as a TUI, Salesforce, Workday, Bloomberg etc would be available as TUIs. Though Bloomberg is the closest to a TUI. but let's continue to delude ourselves.
  • mert-kurttutan 6mo ago
    Yeah. I expected article to give much more thorough analysis and set of observations and trends. As far as the actual observation of popularity of TUI, the only relevant part is claude and codex. The rest is about his personal opinion of TUI (vs other UIs) Nobody here (especially top comments) seems to mention this. Very low on the actual information side.
• jdw64 6mo ago
  Developers often say that TUIs are better. But this is largely a matter of taste. To be honest, outside the programmer class, how many groups of users actually like TUIs? Very few. Linux is lighter, and these days even gaming through tools like Wine/Proton has improved a lot. So why do Windows and GUI-based systems still sell more and get used more widely? Because most people prefer wrapped UIs. They prefer interfaces that visually package the system for them. Electron has real problems: memory usage, deployment bloat, and ecosystem fragmentation. But if you move too far toward TUI-first tools, your market target becomes much smaller. So the real question is: why are TUIs coming back in the AI ecosystem? My answer is: AI FOMO. Seriously, why are AI-integrated IDEs like Cursor and Antigravity becoming popular? Even when AI chat is built into the IDE, the IDE often freezes or slows down. If you just open a terminal, it is much faster. So yes, TUIs are attractive in AI workflows because they are fast, direct, remote-friendly, and easy to automate. But explaining their return only as a failure of GUI is too technical a view. There is also a social and market reason: people want access to AI workflows as quickly as possible, even if the interface is not what ordinary users would normally prefer.
• mgaunard 6mo ago
  Power users have always preferred the command-line, since expressing what you want to do as a programming language is of course much more powerful and productive than clicking menus. To avoid context-switching from the command-line, many essential UIs were made text-only. Another route would have been to integrate the command-line within graphical applications, but few did it -- the main example that comes to mind is Jupyter.
  • throwaway27448 6mo ago
    TUIs don't use the command line (ie bash, fish, etc), though. They use ncurses
  • pocksuppet 6mo ago
    Blender is a 3D modelling program with a scripting language in it (Python). When you open the scripting pane, it's a command line. But it doesn't try to force the whole program to be in the command line, only the part where the command line is actually useful.
  • Ferret7446 6mo ago
    TUIs are much closer to GUIs than CLIs. As a CLI enjoyer, I was resigned to the small win that at least many people distinguish TUI and CLI now but then I saw your comment. There are quite a few GUIs that can be navigated with keyboard, e.g. menu bars can usually be activated with alt or win and single key presses
    • mgaunard 6mo ago
      As I said, the advantage of the TUI is that they avoid context-switching.
      • danny_codes 6mo ago
        Except the part where you switch into the TUI from a normal bash prompt, and your normal bash invocations get eaten by the parser.. Which is essentially exactly the same thing, except your UI is trash relative to a normal GUI
• hilti 6mo ago
  I totally agree with the author that Windows GUIs and MacOS GUIs are getting worse with every iteration. For my own side project I used ImGUI and it's working great for my purpose. It's by far not as beautiful rendered as the native OS layers, but easy to navigate and a good foundation for cross platform GUI development. And I got it even approved for the MacOS app store. Here's my write up: https://marchildmann.com/blog/imgui-mac-app-store/ https://marchildmann.com/blog/imgui-mac-app-store/
• spankalee 6mo ago
  I really don't get terminal UIs that try to rebuild GUI-like functionality. Don't we think that computer interfaces should get better? We're not limited to a grid of characters to pretend to draw lines and shapes with anymore. You can't even display an image in a terminal without a non-standard terminal like Kitty or iTerm. It's just a shame that we don't have a great cross-platform, streamed, UI system. The web is great in it's own ways, but clearly something could be a lot better for this purpose. Flutter's ok, but not on-demand enough and too married to Dart.
  • sys_64738 6mo ago
    It's for speed over SSH text is fast. Graphical redrawing of RDP/VNC/whatever is just slower and tedious in the long run.
  • whartung 6mo ago
    This is because of the failure of the modern GUI environment. They want a GUI, but, instead, they have to resort to something like this. A GUI in a TUI. They want something portable. They want something that can run remotely. They want something they can run more safely than having to expose a socket. They don't want to have to bring up an entire desktop. Rootless windows are effectively dead. That leaves web interfaces (and all of their issues) or doing a TUI, where all you need is an SSH connection that everyone already has. In the past you could slap something together with Tcl/Tk, and just launch the window over X Windows. That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway. The LCD is SSH, and these are the only things that fit.
    • cedws 6mo ago
      Agreed. I dread GUI development, hence I never build GUIs. If there were a library for my language of choice that worked multi-platform and used native components then I’d be interested.
    • tonyarkles 6mo ago
      > That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway. I was quite recently, but even then remote X is missing a really big usability piece: keeping a long-running application open on the host and periodically connecting to it from a remote node (concretely: connecting to my server from my laptop). VNC/RDP/etc all do this at the desktop level, but they're pretty mediocre experience-wise. tmux gives me this for terminal applications without really any compromises. I run tmux for local terminals as well as remote terminals; the hotkeys are all deep muscle memory at this point. It just works.
• maptime 6mo ago
  [dead]
• apexalpha 6mo ago
  Shoutout to k9s. Fantastic tool.
• ilaksh 6mo ago
  It's based on trends, momentum and social signaling more than anything, like most things in technology and society. Humans are herd animals. I am affected by it also and have always been fond of TUIs in a nostalgic way.
• throwaway27448 6mo ago
  Cuz they're cheap and people don't care. Same reason by electron interfaces are so common
• xupybd 6mo ago
  Luke Smith was too early on this.
• 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
  It's nuts that software developers are allowed to design user interfaces at all. They're incapable of making a user interface that isn't text. It's like if plumbers designed houses, they'd make all the floors slope downward, because that's the easiest way for pipes to run. Oh we need multiple windows we can move around/resize? Let's make them text windows. We want people to be able to quickly select options? Yeah make those text boxes. We want to quickly compose documents with some kinda style/formatting? Yeah they'll need to write more text to format it (but let's not make any apps to easily view the text in formatted mode).
  • ninth_ant 6mo ago
    Allowed? Many if not most of these open source TUI projects were started by individuals or small teams who wanted to solve a problem for themselves. It’s allowed. You don’t have to use them.
  • robinhood 6mo ago
    Wtf are you talking about? Give a developer a decent design system, and we are good to go.
  • mghackerlady 6mo ago
    On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have material and (to some extent) adwaita which look pretty but are absolutely useless for anything more complex than app style development or maybe a file manager
• theanonymousone 6mo ago
  TUIs are extremely more portable, and offer a more uniform UX across platforms.
  • orbital-decay 6mo ago
    They are so portable that Windows needs a separate terminal emulator to be able to run *nix tooling properly.
• einpoklum 6mo ago
  The bottom of the post contains an interesting suggestion, for us software developers to read one of three 'basics' books on UI: "Nielsen, Norman or Johnson". Can someone who is more knowledgeable about these help compare and contrast these three texts a bit?
• ifh-hn 6mo ago
  I'm pretty sure dismissing flutter is ignoring reality. It, and more so dart, are not popular on HN, but it definitely is a popular and still in development truly cross platform framework.
  • einpoklum 6mo ago
    Where would one go to familiarize one's self with Flutter and with dart?
    • ifh-hn 6mo ago
      https://flutter.dev/ https://flutter.dev/ https://dart.dev/ https://dart.dev/ https://dartpad.dev/ https://dartpad.dev/
      • einpoklum 6mo ago
        I saw that - and it doesn't seem to fit the bill. First, Dart is a language, not a GUI toolkit; and Flutter seems to be focused on Dart. It also seems to be opinionated in other ways in the introduction, rather than exemplifying its flexibility and adaptability to _your_ platform, programming language etc. Most importantly, it seems it will get you to produce apps whose UI fits a mobile phone rather than a desktop. I also get the sense that Google has strong control over this project. Maybe I'm mis-perceiving - but that's the impression the flutter.dev site gives people.
        • ifh-hn 5mo ago
          Dart is the language flutter (the gui toolkit) is written in. I've no idea what you mean regarding: "rather than exemplifying its flexibility and adaptability to _your_ platform, programming language etc". It can produced mobile, web, or desktop apps from the same codebase... Dart and flutter are open source projects supported by Google, like android and go lang. Seems like you're looking for excuses not to use dart/flutter. That's fine but you could just say you don't want to use them.
• devmor 6mo ago
  I think most people are missing the forest for the trees. TUIs are popular because once you use a piece of software that doesn't have a poorly-written GUI library full of animations bogging it down, you don't want to go back. It's hard to make a TUI that isn't snappy, no matter how much useless eye-candy it has.
• xmodem 6mo ago
  TUIs suck and the only reason they are seeing a re-surgency of relevance is because everything else sucks more along one or more critical metrics. Given the truly incomprehensible amount of CPU and GPU power we have available, this is truly a blight on our industry.
• zmmmmm 6mo ago
  I think it's the smoldering ruins of the OS vendor self interest collapsing in on itself. There's not a single good universal UI. The best is the browser and it is reasonably successful but the sandbox makes it specifically unsuitable / high friction for doing things that need local access to files, network, etc. And it is ridiculously high overhead if you just want to run something simple. Then remote access is even more a debacle. Can I access an application running on my windows host from my Mac? can I forward that through a tunneled connection? TUI is a simple, universal protocol that does what you need and is natively remote. Whatever I use locally will seamlessly work over an SSH connection. And it's a big middle finger to the OS vendors who thought locking everyone in by making everything incompatible or ecosystem specific was a winning strategy.
  • walrus01 6mo ago
    The failure of the modern absurd GUI environment (Windows 11 is a GREAT example) is why I keep coming back to something like a minimalist xfce4 desktop environment. There really isn't a need for all the absurdity.
    • papyrus9244 6mo ago
      I've been using openbox for decades now. It doesn't get in the way, and I don't need more.
  • ho_schi 6mo ago
    And TUIs * Are simple to grasp for uses * Efficient to use (not just resource wise) * Look nice on nice terminals Notcurses (C++) and Ratatui (Rust) did help ncurses (C) a lot.
• samgranieri 6mo ago
  I spend all day in a terminal multiplexer (zellij) with neovim and other splits. Using things like k9s / btop / lazygit / lazydocker helm / stern / whatever that systemd TUI I saw in here and started and will check out later just keeps me focused in one window, and that’s pretty cool
  • hombre_fatal 6mo ago
    Also I can use the same tools on macOS and Linux machines over SSH. And I can use these tools on headless machines. A GUI is a huge regression here.
• hexo 6mo ago
  I'm not surprised at all, if I was to choose from TUI or browser-gui (electron, react, react-native, anything similar) i'd always choose TUI. Good gui design died a long ago. Almost every gui designer needs us to always look at some nonsense animations that serve zero purpose and just make you needlessly wait. There is no such thing as "essential" animation in GUI. And no, plain simple progress bar does not count as animation, but rotating "progress circle" does. GUIs got so unbelievably bloated, it used to be an advantage to have more pixels, as you could pack more information in useful way. Today? Nah. Look at signal (or signal-desktop), it's not even funny anymore. Dolphin used to be good file explorer. Today it's borderline usable, animated so much so that i have to maintain own patched version. One just cannot hide from this, mostly because devs do not understand (or want to acknowledge) need for this stuff to be configurable (instead they more likely focus on stuff no one actually needs. again looking at you, signal.). Or stuff like libadwaita that is likely one of the most arrogant take on gui library ever.
• Asooka 6mo ago
  I kind of wish we had HTML but for GUI. Imagine if you had a "gui" flag in terminfo and you could send an escape sequence on stdout after which you could send out screen updates as a stripped down form of HTML on stdout and receive events on stdin. I mean something that can describe the simplest bog standard Windows 95 application with a menu bar, side bar, dialogs, buttons, and proportional text. Otherwise we could offer a GUI for applications over SSH by having the terminal open a local TCP socket connected to stdin/out and launch the user's browser, implementing the most barebones CGI.
  • danpalmer 6mo ago
    HTML does describe GUIs though. Browsers are engines that turn a text description of a GUI into a rendered GUI. I get your point, it does feel like there's something different, but I'd suggest that there is no black and white line, instead there's a spectrum, with fully native local UI at one end and fully declarative remote GUI at the other end. HTML and the web exist somewhere towards the latter. There have been many attempts at points all the way along that line though, and every point comes with trade-offs. Performance degrades, OS-native components are eschewed, programming gets higher level, etc.
• nout 6mo ago
  I think Midnight Commander is still the most advanced TUI there is. It has so many hidden capabilities that you may not even know about. You can be connected over ssh to another computer, while browsing the inside of a compressed zip file and previewing the content of the file inside of it . If you enable lynx motion and case insensitive - you are navigating across folders so much faster than just trying to "cd" and "ls"... It's impressive that this category of file managers has worked the same way for more than 40 years - the same shortcuts, etc.
• danpalmer 6mo ago
  I wish TUIs weren't back. I'll take a web interface over a TUI any day. No installing fonts that are too clever, no tweaking my terminal config to get it to display right, no guessing the navigation shortcuts that person thought was best, real text editing with OS standard text navigation, better integration with my password manager, text expander, etc... I live on the CLI, I have one a hotkey away, but please, technology has advanced significantly since the terminal was the only option, and we have far better options for building UIs now.
  • __alexs 6mo ago
    I spent decades using vim and Emacs but having moved to GUIs a few years ago I can't see myself going back. This whole TUI thing just seems like a fashion trend.
  • stdatomic 6mo ago
    Web interfaces aren't any better. They're designed to for aesthetics and not functionality. Not to mention the fact that they all have their own UI idioms that you have to pick up on.
• neomantra 6mo ago
  They've been back and we're all taking them further than ever before! For the past few weeks I've been wrapping up Booba [1], which is developer tooling to combine BubbleTea and Ghostty in WASM deployments (using ghostty-web). It provides for some interesting deployment patterns both locally, over network, and embedded in a web page. It's intended to be very easy to adopt; at the simplest, one just changes `tea.NewProgram` to `booba.NewProgram`. I used Booba to make a demo page [2] for our NTCharts TUI library published to GitHub Pages. The repo READMEs have GIFs... this page is all embedded WASM. There's also new Kitty-Graphics-supported widgets in there (picture, chartpicture); I updated Booba and Ghostty-Web to support it. Still getting the kinks out. [1] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/go-booba https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/go-booba [2] https://nimblemarkets.github.io/ntcharts/demos/heatpicture-perlin https://nimblemarkets.github.io/ntcharts/demos/heatpicture-p...
• Dwedit 6mo ago
  We need lightweight HTML/JavaScript applications that aren't an entire web browser. You already have a web browser installed, you shouldn't need yet another copy of Chromium to run some HTML/JS files. Because browser makers cripple HTML files run from your own computer (can't fetch any files, even from the same directory), you are forced to start a web server just to run HTML and JS files from your own hard drive. If you have python installed, you can start a web server with a couple lines of shell script. Is there any really good truly lightweight webserver? (Something under 256KB)
  • PunchyHamster 6mo ago
    No we don't. Browsers are wrong abstraction for GUIs
  • zero_shift 6mo ago
    Take a look at Wails, Neutrino, etc.
• deleted 6mo ago
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• ghc 6mo ago
  > Reviewing code is important, but it's only 50% of the learning process, at best I don't know about everyone else, but the code I reviewed as a Junior was high quality code I was expected to learn from. That's entirely different from doing code review on whatever CC outputs.
• matheusmoreira 6mo ago
  Terminals are great but they seem to be turning into literal browsers and it's starting to worry me.
  • Ekaros 6mo ago
    Just wait. Soon the terminal will be electron based. Showing electron running inside it somehow...
• tiffanyh 6mo ago
  CLI Dumb question and slightly off topic, but is there a reason why so many AI tools are CLIs … as opposed to just an API or another interface? I feel like I’m missing the obvious in why there feels like an explosion of CLI tools lately, related to AI.
• CyberBlaed 6mo ago
  I’d love it for my Mac if my wall paper can be a TUI app of my choice. Interact as needed, matrix screen saver when idle to prevent burn in. I don’t see terminal apps as heavy at all… How to make them a wallpaper thats interactive I wonder…? Funny if I just search it… PlashApp by Sinde, Set to Termix docker and BOOM :)
• JamesStuff 6mo ago
  There is only so much rounding of borders you can do in the terminal! On a 16” MacBook, you can’t have Activity Monitor take up less than about 2/5 of the width of the screen! There is so much padding around every single element. I don’t need pretty buttons, I need usability and readability. Without having a 50” display!
  • maxrev17 6mo ago
    Somewhere along the way everything got dumbed down and all the info removed. It’s some condescending ‘so dumb ppl can take it in’ marketing bs I hear from time to time. And it sucks! I also doubt it’s true. Fashion be fashion.
• chvid 6mo ago
  A React app that renders to text running inside a terminal implemented using electron.
• musha68k 6mo ago
  I'm biased towards CLI and reign of LLMs means we're all Unix/text (for) now. So IMO there are many reasons, but chiefly amongst them is UI/HCI design leader Apple throwing out their/industry's interaction design best practices over the last 10+ years. Embracing constraints and "how it works" used to be at the core of their software ethos.
• deleted 6mo ago
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• alex_young 6mo ago
  CLI. Wtf is a TUI? LLMs say it has some to do with interactivity in a menu or something, but believe me, we had this all in the 80’s. Nothing new here, but the truth is the CLI is better faster and cheaper. Pick all three.
  • wren6991 6mo ago
    CLI is "run a command, get output, drop you back at your shell prompt". TUI is a full-screen interface inside the terminal which you stay inside of, no longer interacting with your shell.
    • alex_young 6mo ago
      I think that’s what we used to call a program. Things like vi and wordstar seem like they’d qualify.
      • wren6991 6mo ago
        Yes I agree, something like vi or GNU nano is a great example of a TUI. The meaning is drifting a bit but I think the distinction is useful: a CLI program is one that you can invoke from a Makefile.
• cameldrv 6mo ago
  One thing I like about TUIs is that they can usually be completely operated from the keyboard. Most GUI apps have flows that you need the mouse for, and they’re slow if have to do that often.
• hebetude 6mo ago
  Some of us never switched to gui. Who wants to stop working to move a mouse around?
• whatever1 6mo ago
  Because we are all working on remote machines these days. Laptops have become thin clients that run fat local electron browsers that connect to the actual computer via http / ssh. We made our machines 100x faster and instead of running compute locally we just made 100x slower client software.
• te_chris 6mo ago
  Why am I back on the terminal and 40k lines deep in my own ai-workflow tui? Two reasons: 1) AI writes my dotfiles. It fucking rules. 2) charm bracelet tui ecosystem in go is ace and ai writes it well.
• aibudaev 6mo ago
  In any course, if the UI does not make any sense, the project should be failed. Failing projects over bad UI teaches fear, not design. Good interfaces come from iteration and feedback - which is exactly what user-centered design is about
• Ekaros 6mo ago
  I think well made GUI will always be superior to TUI. And have all the same possibilities and more. But it is also very sad that now decades into this computing thing we do not have any accepted good ways to make GUIs. Or at least widespread enough ways.
• CopyOnWrite 6mo ago
  For the record: I have a terminal open at all times, my life is automated trough Bash scripts and I am a VIM / TMUX user. With that background, most TUIs are really two steps back compared to a decent GUI. (Wild west navigation/hotekeys, broken copy and paste, lack of integration with the environment, just to name a few.) The core of the problem is IMHO, that we really lack a decent cross platform GUI platform, which is really integrated into a programming language or part of the standard library. Outside of Swing (which lacks access to a native browser element), we have Tk (no browser component, no drag'n'drop, at least from Tkinter), wxWidgets (seems that the community is very small and especially its bindings needed to be resurrected at least once), Qt with the ever looming possibility that it will get deshittified to make more money (... and no, KDE is not that important and I doubt the KDE community could take care of a fork long term). Which leaves us with Electron or the other variants of 'browser component + JavaScript/CSS and callbacks to a local server, which is a really bad programming model (ignoring the memory/runtime overhead for even trivial applications). The problem is, to build a decent cross platform gui toolkit, one needs a lot of funding and a lot of people (usability, accessibility, design, documentation, testing...). The open source community didn't manage to pull this off (GTK is by now for all practical purposes Linux only) and there is no modern contender for Qt or Swing (with their own problems). TUIs are no solution to the core problem (and it would be absolutely possible to have a GUI toolkit with a TUI renderer for perhaps 80% of GUI needs), but I understand every developer who chooses TUIs for cross platform UIs given the alternatives.
  • kergonath 6mo ago
    I think you are right and completely agree with most of your points. > wxWidgets (seems that the community is very small and especially its bindings needed to be resurrected at least once) Which is a damn shame because they are very close to native appearances on both macOS and Windows and are much easier to program than anything Qt. I think it’s the solution I prefer for multi platform GUIs, both as a user and as an occasional programmer. > Electron or the other variants of 'browser component + JavaScript/CSS and callbacks to a local server On the other hand, I absolutely hate this as a user. I would lose features and go back to the command line rather than having to deal with this. Everything is wrong in these applications, they don’t support standard keyboard shortcuts, they look weird and out of place and lag where you least expect it. > TUIs are no solution to the core problem (and it would be absolutely possible to have a GUI toolkit with a TUI renderer for perhaps 80% of GUI needs) There are a couple of TUI framework that are almost there already. I like the fact that they are useable without fuss over ssh and stuff but I think they are solving the wrong problem. I would rather use something like tmux but that sucks less for the windowing and persistence bits and get more focused and composable CLI. Make a simple REPL with readline so it has a standard and expected behaviour instead of trying to make everything look or behave like an IDE. OTOH, I really like how this is driving improvement in terminal emulators.
• jacobwiseberg 6mo ago
  > I do not necessarily argue for cross-platform support, but having one such solution would help reduce the electron and TUI dependency. I think this is the primary reason. I feel like whether or not there are good native libraries things were bound to converge into cross-platform preferencing since it's cheaper to produce and maintain.
• mg794613 6mo ago
  When kubernetes got introduced, we didnt want to interact with only webpages/fronts. So we created tooling we know on the CLI. Every person here that thinks its AI that caused the resurgence of CLI tools is a vibe coder who just entered the scene this year.
• stephschie 6mo ago
  Am I missing something: "[TUIs are] easy to automate". What am I not seeing or know about? I had to go crazy mad routes of automating TUIs with `tmux` just to get to some repeatable process.
• namelosw 6mo ago
  It doesn't really make sense to me. I've been using Emacs and Vim for decades, and have been using Claude Code for months, but I moved to Codex GUI and the VSCode Claude Code plugin eventually. The biggest problem is that monospaced fonts are not really the best for reading, and with coding agents, people should be reading text most of the time. The current implementation isn't command-line, but a re-implemented GUI in disguise, awkward and even more buggy. Why should I use that over a GUI? I would prefer Electron over those TUI unless I have to SSH.
• jimmypk 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• mark_l_watson 6mo ago
  I love TUIs because so much of my dev career was ssh/mosh/tmux to remote servers and working where the fast network bandwidth and computational crunch lived. I was vibe coding a layer on top of textual last week that allows me to plug in both interactive and information display Python functions into a TUI grid. Really simple stuff, with textual doing the heavy lifting.
• perarneng 6mo ago
  Two advantages: - Deliver apps over remote - Superfast keyboard interaction (forced) One big disadvantages: - Limited graphics and advanced UI component support I would say the optimal UI is a Keyboard driven normal Desktop app. An app that can take full advantage of graphics elements of a desktop app but is lightning fast to interact with thanks to that it's keyboard driven. Very few people build apps like that though. Sure there are keyboard hints in many apps but they are usually not 100% guaranteed to cover all cases and are sometimes an afterthought.
• elzbardico 5mo ago
  I worked in a lot of places where mainframe applications survived along with their more moder replacement for years, because experienced users were orders of magnitude more efficient using old mainframe TUIs than the clunky and slow web interfaces that replaced them. Even in the PC world, the move from DOS based TUI programs to windows GUI in applications like POS was not without some user trauma and insatisfaction.
• Gud 5mo ago
  Were they gone?
• AndyMcConachie 5mo ago
  One of my first jobs was working on Telephony User Interfaces (TUIs). Everytime I see the term TUI I can't help but think of that. For people who don't know this version of TUI, it's the ole, "Press 1 for X, Press 2 for Y" kind of interfaces that you use over a phone. Think voicemail text-to-speech and automated speech recognition.
• cyberge99 5mo ago
  I have a theory that we’re moving back to TUIs because they’re responsive and will be compatible with wearables. It’s easy to overlay just text using TUI’s onto a visual portal.
• tokkkie 5mo ago
  TUIs are popular not because they're TUIs, but because they're simple. We didn't need the bloat in the first place.
• Timwi 5mo ago
  The article spends a lot of time talking about how UIs “look” and how they all “look different”. That's not the important aspect to me. For me what makes a software usable in the long run (after initial learn) is shortcuts and keyboard navigability. Old GUI frameworks had built-in features for this (app-wide shortcuts, underlined letters, etc.). The web has haphazardly copied one of them (“accesskey” attribute), but now this has been completely forgotten. None of the major websites have accesskeys, even for the most frequently used element like the search bar. There are no shortcuts for frequently used functions such as “like”, “reply”, what have you. It's like developers have universally forgotten that the keyboard exists and what it can do. TUIs don't solve that.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• UmaParu 5mo ago
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