I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s a sorry state of affairs.
As LLMs consume all our compute resources and drive up prices for the compute hardware on which we run applications, the silver lining is that LLMs are helpful in implementing tooling without a heavy stack so it will run quickly on a lower-spec computer.
I've achieved 3 and 4 orders of magnitude CPU performance boosts and 50% RAM reductions using C in places I wouldn't normally and by selecting/designing efficient data structures. TUIs are a good example of this trend. For internal engineering, to be able to present the information we need while bypassing the millions of SLoC in the webstack is more efficient in almost every regard.
The question is how many decades each user of your software would have to use it in order to offset, through the optimisation it provides, the energy consumption you burned through with LLMs.
In the past week I made 4 different tasks that were going to make my m4brun at full tilt for a week optimized down to 20 minutes with just a few prompts. So more like an hour to pay off not decades. average claude invocation is .3 wh. m4 usez 40-60 watts, so 24x7x40 >> .3 * 10
When global supply chains are disrupted again, energy and/or compute costs will skyrocket, meaning your org may be forced to defer hardware upgrades and LLMs may no longer be cost effective (as over-leveraged AI companies attempt to recover their investment with less hardware than they'd planned.) Once this happens, it may be too late to draw on LLMs to quickly refactor your code.
If your business requirements are stable and you have a good test suite, you're living in a golden age for leveraging your current access to LLMs to reduce your future operational costs.
Especially considering that suddenly everyone and their mother create their own software with LLMs instead of using almost-perfect-but-slighty-non-ideal software others written before.
I’m not really worried about energy consumption. We have more energy falling out of the sky than we could ever need. I’m much more interested in saving human time so we can focus on bigger problems, like using that free energy instead of killing ourselves extracting and burning limited resources.
I don't see any real advantage of TUIs over web forms or GUIs for the same thing.
I do like CLIs though, especially the ones that are properly capable of working in pipelines. Composing a pipeline of simple command-line utilities to achieve exactly what you want is very powerful.
There are some applications/systems for which certifying bodies forbid the use of web management because of vulnerabilities in both the protocols and the clients and servers. For example, in my daily, several national cyber organizations (NSA, CSE, GCHQ, etc.) have such direction. That's why our main product line is managed using a TUI accessed at the local console or over SSH (with very, very carefully curated SELinux MAC, among other things).
Having said that....
If one is willing to build one's own HTTP server with integrated MAC, etc., and is able to demonstrate mitigations against known vulnerabilities, one may be able to get the certifying bodies on board. Time will tell.
Yes, this is very niche, but TUIs are in general niche.
I like a TUI when I always want an app to run side by side with a CLI. It’s easier to do split windows in a terminal or tmux/zellij panes than to script two separate app windows to stay locked together as a pair. Although, I’d welcome advice as to how to do it better.
I also find TUIs are easier to program for the same reason they’re limited. Fewer human interface aspects in play and it’s not offensive to use the same UI across OSes. (There are still under-the-hood differences across OSes, e.g. efficient file event watching.)
Gemini made a lovely TUI for my C# project, but afterwards it said it could just spin up a Kestrel web server inside the app instead which would be a much better solution for managing it, which was fair. (I have a line in my Agents to warn me when I specify a way of building something and it's not the ideal solution)
Having a tui file picker in the pipeline can be a powerful technique. Sometimes it just makes sense to have an interface that is slightly more interactive than pre-selecting all the files makes the flow smoother. Being able to put that into a script/alias/whatever is nice.
Other CLI things benefit from this "have a minimal ui interface in the workflow for the one step where it makes sense".
I just added a TUI built on Charm for my custom agent. I primarily use it for two things.
1. Navigating all my chat sessions and doing admin work. It's super fast to push a single key to go in and see what it was about before deleting it.
2. Testing out features and code changes without the web UI / vs code extension complexity.
3. Places where I cannot connect VS Code. I still want to chat and see diffs, a TUI is much easier than a CLI for this.
It also has a CLI, basically three interfaces (CLI, TUI, GUI (vscode/webapp)) to the core features of my personal swiss army knife (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof)
It was like two-shot, cos the first version had some issues with CJK chars.
I was impressed as it would have taken me a bunch of screwing around on lining up all the data etc when I wanted to concentrate on the scraping algorithm, not the pretty bits.
Indeed. Over a few days of iterations I had this TUI built for fast full-text search of Claude Code or Codex sessions using Ratatui (and Tantivy for the full-text search index). I would never have dreamed of this pre coding agents.
I think mc (Midnight Commander) is still one of the best TUIs available - it's very close in capability to the GUI versions (like Double Commander) and it has the benefits of tuis - like that you can run it on a remote system.
It looks outdated, but I'm actually now working on a new skin that will hopefully be included in the next release of mc.
If it was so easy Anthropic wouldn't have messed up CC for so long. The author takes for granted the availability of good off-the-shelf TUI libraries for his chosen language.
Big reason why TUIs were popular in the first place is because they are so much simpler to build. Compare ncurses to GTK/Qt, they are completely different leagues. One of my pet ideas is to build a ncurses compatible/style library that skips terminal layer and instead renders directly to Wayland, kinda getting the simplicity of ncurses without dragging all the legacy junk with it.
Yet ironically getting Claude Code to run at 60fps is way way harder in a TUI? Kinda funny that they optimized for "simple" then footgunned themselves into a client that probably took thousands of man hours to get to a reasonable place for power users.
I too enjoy the charm TUI libraries, and have been using them to build a settlers of Catan game[0]. And some features are really cool, like different colors depending on dark/light theme.
They have a bunch of functions that concatenate strings, which may not be very efficient compared to using string.builders, but I haven't yet had performance problems.
However I haven't had such a great experience with AI, IMO they're bad at ASCII art.
I want my interfacing with computers to be mouseless and TUIs offer that. I don’t think I’ve run into a GUI, no matter how many hotkeys it has and I know, where I didn’t have to reach for the mouse.
CLI only also requires remembering commands, some of which I use very infrequently, thus need to look up every time I use them.
I think TUIs hold a very nice spot between GUIs and CLI.
VS Code with the Vim extension is largely mouseless
I use the TUI from a terminal tab in VS Code, my agent works with that and the custom extension with a webapp based interface, seamlessly and concurrently
GUIs, TUIs, and PR/kanban all make sense in different situations. We'll all use at least two of them on regular basis for coding agents.
> VS Code with the Vim extension is largely mouseless
It's also easily mouseless without any Vim or like extension. I never mouse in it, having given intuitive-to-me keychords to all the various moves I need to make beyond the standard stuff.
I was working on a fairly niche thing, a library of crossplane compositions written in KCL and thought it would be nice to have a TUI so i could browse through them and see the rendered yaml as claude was working on it. I asked claude code to write it with python and textual and it one shotted it in about two minutes including a test suite.
If you have a TUI the correct way to support mobile browsers is to 1-shot a React page equivalent. Trying to make the mobile keyboard work for this would be silly.
Dagger has a really nice TUI built on Charm. It reads OTEL to create an interactive tree for your builds and containers. If you have cloud setup, it will also push that all to a webapp interface where you can share and navigate in perpetuity. This works for both CI and local runs, super cool for sharing links to failed builds during dev, even while the dev's local build is still running
It runs poorly, loses keystrokes, and easily gets bogged down with too much terminal input.
I don't want candy coated monospace ASCII graphics. I want something fast and functional. The graphics are _entirely_ secondary. You've missed the point of what a TUI is.
The problem with TUI's, that we have all Stockholm syndrom'd ourselves, is that I can't use the mouse cursor to click to the position on the screen and edit the command line.
I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s a sorry state of affairs.
As LLMs consume all our compute resources and drive up prices for the compute hardware on which we run applications, the silver lining is that LLMs are helpful in implementing tooling without a heavy stack so it will run quickly on a lower-spec computer.
I've achieved 3 and 4 orders of magnitude CPU performance boosts and 50% RAM reductions using C in places I wouldn't normally and by selecting/designing efficient data structures. TUIs are a good example of this trend. For internal engineering, to be able to present the information we need while bypassing the millions of SLoC in the webstack is more efficient in almost every regard.
The question is how many decades each user of your software would have to use it in order to offset, through the optimisation it provides, the energy consumption you burned through with LLMs.
In the past week I made 4 different tasks that were going to make my m4brun at full tilt for a week optimized down to 20 minutes with just a few prompts. So more like an hour to pay off not decades. average claude invocation is .3 wh. m4 usez 40-60 watts, so 24x7x40 >> .3 * 10
When global supply chains are disrupted again, energy and/or compute costs will skyrocket, meaning your org may be forced to defer hardware upgrades and LLMs may no longer be cost effective (as over-leveraged AI companies attempt to recover their investment with less hardware than they'd planned.) Once this happens, it may be too late to draw on LLMs to quickly refactor your code.
If your business requirements are stable and you have a good test suite, you're living in a golden age for leveraging your current access to LLMs to reduce your future operational costs.
Especially considering that suddenly everyone and their mother create their own software with LLMs instead of using almost-perfect-but-slighty-non-ideal software others written before.
I’m not really worried about energy consumption. We have more energy falling out of the sky than we could ever need. I’m much more interested in saving human time so we can focus on bigger problems, like using that free energy instead of killing ourselves extracting and burning limited resources.
I don't see any real advantage of TUIs over web forms or GUIs for the same thing.
I do like CLIs though, especially the ones that are properly capable of working in pipelines. Composing a pipeline of simple command-line utilities to achieve exactly what you want is very powerful.
There are some applications/systems for which certifying bodies forbid the use of web management because of vulnerabilities in both the protocols and the clients and servers. For example, in my daily, several national cyber organizations (NSA, CSE, GCHQ, etc.) have such direction. That's why our main product line is managed using a TUI accessed at the local console or over SSH (with very, very carefully curated SELinux MAC, among other things).
Having said that....
If one is willing to build one's own HTTP server with integrated MAC, etc., and is able to demonstrate mitigations against known vulnerabilities, one may be able to get the certifying bodies on board. Time will tell.
Yes, this is very niche, but TUIs are in general niche.
I like a TUI when I always want an app to run side by side with a CLI. It’s easier to do split windows in a terminal or tmux/zellij panes than to script two separate app windows to stay locked together as a pair. Although, I’d welcome advice as to how to do it better.
I also find TUIs are easier to program for the same reason they’re limited. Fewer human interface aspects in play and it’s not offensive to use the same UI across OSes. (There are still under-the-hood differences across OSes, e.g. efficient file event watching.)
Gemini made a lovely TUI for my C# project, but afterwards it said it could just spin up a Kestrel web server inside the app instead which would be a much better solution for managing it, which was fair. (I have a line in my Agents to warn me when I specify a way of building something and it's not the ideal solution)
TUIs work well over ssh. Pretty much everything else is a pain in the ass in some capacity, especially when the ssh client is a smartphone.
TUIs are much easier to run in a container, for one thing. Though, I guess a terminal-based web browser would work for some web apps.
Having a tui file picker in the pipeline can be a powerful technique. Sometimes it just makes sense to have an interface that is slightly more interactive than pre-selecting all the files makes the flow smoother. Being able to put that into a script/alias/whatever is nice.
Other CLI things benefit from this "have a minimal ui interface in the workflow for the one step where it makes sense".
I just added a TUI built on Charm for my custom agent. I primarily use it for two things.
1. Navigating all my chat sessions and doing admin work. It's super fast to push a single key to go in and see what it was about before deleting it.
2. Testing out features and code changes without the web UI / vs code extension complexity.
3. Places where I cannot connect VS Code. I still want to chat and see diffs, a TUI is much easier than a CLI for this.
It also has a CLI, basically three interfaces (CLI, TUI, GUI (vscode/webapp)) to the core features of my personal swiss army knife (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof)
Some of my personal favourites TUI are all over GitHub and there are lots of them to have a look at can be found here:
https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
https://terminaltrove.com/explore/
Building for Charm, ratatui and many others is really getting much easier than before thanks to AI.
Gemini built a nice TUI for me for a DHT scraper project I was coding:
https://imgur.com/a/u3KHbDT
It was like two-shot, cos the first version had some issues with CJK chars.
I was impressed as it would have taken me a bunch of screwing around on lining up all the data etc when I wanted to concentrate on the scraping algorithm, not the pretty bits.
Indeed. Over a few days of iterations I had this TUI built for fast full-text search of Claude Code or Codex sessions using Ratatui (and Tantivy for the full-text search index). I would never have dreamed of this pre coding agents.
https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/tools/aichat/...
I think mc (Midnight Commander) is still one of the best TUIs available - it's very close in capability to the GUI versions (like Double Commander) and it has the benefits of tuis - like that you can run it on a remote system. It looks outdated, but I'm actually now working on a new skin that will hopefully be included in the next release of mc.
If it was so easy Anthropic wouldn't have messed up CC for so long. The author takes for granted the availability of good off-the-shelf TUI libraries for his chosen language.
Big reason why TUIs were popular in the first place is because they are so much simpler to build. Compare ncurses to GTK/Qt, they are completely different leagues. One of my pet ideas is to build a ncurses compatible/style library that skips terminal layer and instead renders directly to Wayland, kinda getting the simplicity of ncurses without dragging all the legacy junk with it.
Yet ironically getting Claude Code to run at 60fps is way way harder in a TUI? Kinda funny that they optimized for "simple" then footgunned themselves into a client that probably took thousands of man hours to get to a reasonable place for power users.
> Yet ironically getting Claude Code to run at 60fps is way way harder in a TUI?
That's what happens when you vibe code your app.
I too enjoy the charm TUI libraries, and have been using them to build a settlers of Catan game[0]. And some features are really cool, like different colors depending on dark/light theme.
They have a bunch of functions that concatenate strings, which may not be very efficient compared to using string.builders, but I haven't yet had performance problems.
However I haven't had such a great experience with AI, IMO they're bad at ASCII art.
[0]: https://sr.ht/~vicho/el_poblador/
Do we want tuis?
I can’t stand Gemmin-CLI. That tui gets in the way constantly
I’m mixed in jj’s tui. It’s better than no ui tho
Mostly tho I’m curious when I’d want a tui. Most of the time in a terminal I don’t want one
I do.
I want my interfacing with computers to be mouseless and TUIs offer that. I don’t think I’ve run into a GUI, no matter how many hotkeys it has and I know, where I didn’t have to reach for the mouse.
CLI only also requires remembering commands, some of which I use very infrequently, thus need to look up every time I use them.
I think TUIs hold a very nice spot between GUIs and CLI.
VS Code with the Vim extension is largely mouseless
I use the TUI from a terminal tab in VS Code, my agent works with that and the custom extension with a webapp based interface, seamlessly and concurrently
GUIs, TUIs, and PR/kanban all make sense in different situations. We'll all use at least two of them on regular basis for coding agents.
TUIs make way less sense for your average user
> VS Code with the Vim extension is largely mouseless
It's also easily mouseless without any Vim or like extension. I never mouse in it, having given intuitive-to-me keychords to all the various moves I need to make beyond the standard stuff.
Have you tried jjui? It’s pretty nice
I just want a stream, not a TUI. If you can't | it it's not real
There’s no reason why you can’t have both.
Well behaved CLI tools have for years already been changing their UX depending on whether STDOUT is a TTY or a pipe.
There are plenty of great tools available these days. Bubbletea would be my tool of choice, I think:
https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea
Charm is what the post submission is using
> most importantly, they live inline to your code, preventing constant tab switching
No idea what this means.
I think the implicit assumption here is that you are using a terminal-based code editor like neovim... which is not necessarily true.
I think the reference is to all the TUI based coding tools now like opencode.
Charm looks good. What is the TUI library of choice for python these days?
https://www.textualize.io/
I was working on a fairly niche thing, a library of crossplane compositions written in KCL and thought it would be nice to have a TUI so i could browse through them and see the rendered yaml as claude was working on it. I asked claude code to write it with python and textual and it one shotted it in about two minutes including a test suite.
Building an article is easy now.
The thing with TUIs is that, using mobile native virtual keyboards, it's apparently quite impossible to make them behave in a sane way in browsers!
I think the only reasonable option seems to be reimplementing one yourself, which is massively stupid.
Mobile is not for TUI
More specifically it's an interface designed for a physical keyboard. Or even more specifically it's designed for precise and easy human text input.
especially where you typically type with all fingers instead of just your thumbs
Sure it is. I, and millions of others, use it all the time with for example Termux.
If you have a TUI the correct way to support mobile browsers is to 1-shot a React page equivalent. Trying to make the mobile keyboard work for this would be silly.
Dagger has a really nice TUI built on Charm. It reads OTEL to create an interactive tree for your builds and containers. If you have cloud setup, it will also push that all to a webapp interface where you can share and navigate in perpetuity. This works for both CI and local runs, super cool for sharing links to failed builds during dev, even while the dev's local build is still running
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPEGTfaFnpA
They are! I (well, Claude) built nitpick as a TUI HN client, and it was surprisingly easy to do.
https://github.com/fragmede/nitpick
"Creating garbage is easy now."
It runs poorly, loses keystrokes, and easily gets bogged down with too much terminal input.
I don't want candy coated monospace ASCII graphics. I want something fast and functional. The graphics are _entirely_ secondary. You've missed the point of what a TUI is.
The problem with TUI's, that we have all Stockholm syndrom'd ourselves, is that I can't use the mouse cursor to click to the position on the screen and edit the command line.
I’ve built textual tuis (as in the Python library) and it responds to clicks just fine.
It is possible. Terminals have supported mouse interactions for a long time.
You can use the mouse with TUIs build on the Charm stack
https://github.com/lrstanley/bubblezone
There are a lot of components that resemble things you find in web component libraries