Building a TUI is easy now

https://hatchet.run/blog/tuis-are-easy-now

by abelanger • 5 months ago

306 254 5 months ago

emilfihlman4• 5 months ago

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.

NetOpWibby• 5 months ago

Mobile is not for TUI

bahmboo• 5 months ago

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.

emilfihlman4• 5 months ago

Sure it is. I, and millions of others, use it all the time with for example Termux.

avaer• 5 months ago

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.

1313ed013• 5 months ago

I use TUIs almost daily on my android phone, either some Linux application in Termux or a DOS application in DOSBox. Both have some extra on screen controls to add special keys, and DOSBox in particular allows adding widgets to control things (including invisible buttons, that are fun to add in some cases over parts of the screen in DOS to give an old game or application touch controls).

emilfihlman4• 5 months ago

I also use Termux daily!

It's really a superb tool.

I only wish we could have that same experience without requiring a native app.

jgauth• 5 months ago

Charm looks good. What is the TUI library of choice for python these days?

2muchtime2• 5 months ago

https://www.textualize.io/

socalgal2• 5 months ago

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

2muchtime2• 5 months ago

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.

verdverm7• 5 months ago

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

liveoneggs• 5 months ago

I just want a stream, not a TUI. If you can't | it it's not real

hnlmorg4• 5 months ago

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.

rirze• 5 months ago

Have you tried jjui? It’s pretty nice

esafak2• 5 months ago

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.

SoftTalker2• 5 months ago

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.

christophilus2• 5 months ago

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.

sophacles• 5 months ago

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".

verdverm7• 5 months ago

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)

11235813212• 5 months ago

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.)

1313ed013• 5 months ago

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.

Did you try some tiling window managers and decided you did not like that?

baq4• 5 months ago

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.

qingcharles2• 5 months ago

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)

anonzzzies2• 5 months ago

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

And that helps? I tried that a while ago and it very often said this is not a good way of doing something even though it was objectively the best way of doing something. I removed it after a while because it was too random.

PeterWhittaker• 5 months ago

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.

rgoulter• 5 months ago

In practice, TUIs tend to have good keybindings, & are readily available right in the place where you're running the command (especially for quick tasks).

SoftTalker2• 5 months ago

They can, but don't always. I've used some where you have to smash the TAB key 50 times go move linearly through all the fields and controls. If there are well-implemented navigation keys, yes they it can be very efficient.

duskdozer2• 5 months ago

- easy over ssh

- "within bounds" more; designed for actions with keyboard shortcuts and up/down/left/right

- less busy - devs are constrained or less tempted to add animations, css, and other distractions

fragmede8• 5 months ago

They are! I (well, Claude) built nitpick as a TUI HN client, and it was surprisingly easy to do.

https://github.com/fragmede/nitpick

christophilus2• 5 months ago

There are plenty of great tools available these days. Bubbletea would be my tool of choice, I think:

https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

verdverm7• 5 months ago

Charm is what the post submission is using

esclerofilo• 5 months ago

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/

fragmede8• 5 months ago

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.

verdverm7• 5 months ago

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

willm2• 5 months ago

It is possible. Terminals have supported mouse interactions for a long time.

fragmede8• 5 months ago

possible isn't the same as supported and working. A non-terminal hunt-and-peck typer sits down and is presented with a terminal, what's the second that happens when they're typing? they make a mistake and try to click on the word they misspelled, and it doesn't work.

baq4• 5 months ago

I’ve built textual tuis (as in the Python library) and it responds to clicks just fine.

MisterTea• 5 months ago

FWIW, Plan 9 windows work this way. They are just plain UTF-8 buffers with no typewriter emulation. You can edit any text you wish. If you want graphics, the draw device is a 2D graphics compositor you load assets into then issue rendering commands. Text is a draw primitive and easily displayed any way you want, angled, rotated, moving around, colorful. VT emulation is accomplished by vt(1) which does VT over stdio and emulates an ANSI typewriter using the draw device and it works well. You could even write a Plan 9 native TUI That way, just run it under vt(1). But I would not recommend that - go native.

johan914• 5 months ago

Emacs vterm can do this. It's the only terminal emulator I'm aware of that can, because it seems nobody else cares. It can even backspace and delete all the text selected.

verdverm7• 5 months ago

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

nout• 5 months ago

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.

il-b• 5 months ago

Kudos to all mc developers!

CoolCold• 5 months ago

I had bad feelings on MC, as it's flaky.

Far Manager or Dos Navigator are much better IMO.

sellmesoap• 5 months ago

I had mc on my $20 second hand 286, there are some newer takes on the classic, ranger and nnn come to mind, support for images on the terminal with sixel is pretty neat!

https://github.com/ranger/ranger

https://github.com/jarun/nnn

pelcg• 5 months ago

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.

elevation3• 5 months ago

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.

mseepgood• 5 months ago

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.

embedding-shape• 5 months ago

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.

mulmen• 5 months ago

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.

grogenaut• 5 months ago

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

elevation3• 5 months ago

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.

coldtea6• 5 months ago

Would it be that many? Asked AI to do some rough calculation, and it spit that:

Making 50 SOTA AI requests per day ≈ running a 10W LED bulb for about 2.5 hours per day

Given I usually have 2-3 lights on all day in the house, that's like 1500 LLM requests per day (which sounds quite more than I do).

So even a month worth of requests for building some software doesn't sound that much. Having a local beefy traditional build server compling or running tests for 4 hours a day would be like ~7,600 requests/day

teaearlgraycold• 5 months ago

They’re also great for reducing dependencies. What used to be a new dependency and 100 sub-dependencies from npm can now be 200 lines of 0-import JS.

logicprog• 5 months ago

I suspect that a native GUI, or even something like GPUI or Flutter would be still more performant than TUI's, which are bound by the limitations of emulating terminals.

sunshowers2• 5 months ago

A very important thing about constraints is that they also liberate. TUIs automatically work over ssh, can be suspended with ctrl-z and such, and the keyboard focus has resulted in helpful conventions like ctrl-R that tend to not be as prominent in GUIs.

coldtea6• 5 months ago

would be still more performant than TUI's, which are bound by the limitations of emulating terminals.

That's what makes them great. As opposed to modern "minimal" waste of space UIs or the Electron crappage.

keybored• 5 months ago

Building an article is easy now.

lysace• 5 months ago

Hah.

zokier• 5 months ago

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.

CuriouslyC• 5 months ago

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.

weebull• 5 months ago

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.

NSPG911• 5 months ago

It's just their tech debt. They chose to use react.js in the terminal via ink, and essentially footgun their way through each update.

tantalor• 5 months ago

most importantly, they live inline to your code, preventing constant tab switching

No idea what this means.

oj-hn-dot-com• 5 months ago

I think the reference is to all the TUI based coding tools now like opencode.

prydt• 5 months ago

I think the implicit assumption here is that you are using a terminal-based code editor like neovim... which is not necessarily true.

empath75• 5 months ago

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.

qingcharles2• 5 months ago

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.

aspenmayer• 5 months ago

I’d be interested to hear more about your project. I’ve heard about other DHT related things like search engines and such using it, but I haven’t explored the space much myself.

codethief2• 5 months ago

"DHT" as is "distributed hash table"?

(That is indeed a nice TUI.)

odiroot• 5 months ago

What libraries did it use?

dwb15• 5 months ago

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.

dale_glass• 5 months ago

I disagree, I think TUIs are a great fit in some problem domains.

Think for instance the Debian package configuration dialogs -- they're far more comfortable than the same questions without a TUI, and still work over a serial console if you have to use one.

For tools like various kinds of "top", there's many potential tools you can use to the same end and intentionally using one that draws CPU graphs over one that just displays a number. Graphs are much easier to interpret than a column of numbers.

In many cases they're the optimal choice given some constraint -- like the desire to have minimal dependencies, working over SSH, and being usable without breaking the flow. Yeah, you could make a tunnel to a tool that runs a local webserver and delivers graphs by HTTP, but the ergonomics of that are terrible.

dwb15• 5 months ago

Sure, I said I understand why people build them. I’ve used a lot of them. And yes with the tools we have you’re right, but I’m more lamenting the wonky, kind of archaic, unintegrated, only-semi-composable toolset that we have. No fundamental reason why you couldn’t deliver more structured UIs directly over SSH or a serial console, it’s just that in this timeline that didn’t happen yet (apart from X forwarding, which isn’t quite what I’m on about).

danudey• 5 months ago

The difference there, in Debian's case at least, is that there is a distinction between the frontend and the configuration backend; you're probably most familiar with the `newt` frontend, but there's also `text` (for textual entry without using curses or anything), `noninteractive` (for just use the defaults), gnome, kde, teletype, or even 'web' which does not seem to work effectively but is a neat idea regardless.

TUIs which are just TUI views of data you can get otherwise are fine; TUIs which are the only way to interact with something... less so.

elevation3• 5 months ago

Yes, but this kind of dashboard was never going to be accessible anyway. It's a dense visual representation of vast system state with constant real-time fluctuation. Even in a browser, it would be hell to navigate the constantly changing state with a screen reader. And visually increasing the scale and contrast defeats the purpose of the density of the original display.

If you need to support screen readers, your UI would have to be totally different: You should allow the user to snapshot the system state and navigate it. Generate succinct summary text to impart the same sense that a dashboard would to a visual user. "Normal: All systems OK" "Critical: Boeing RPA servers down since 2:17PM PDT and 54 others". Once you've done this work, a CLI tool could expose this just as screen-readable:

    $ cli status
      all systems OK, last outage resolved 2:27 PDT

    $ cli topjob cpu
      117 Boeing RPA, 78% CPU
      434 SAIC PDM, 43% CPU

    $ cli downtime today 117
      Boeing RPA down 10 minutes today, resolved now

dwb15• 5 months ago

I’m not just talking about screen readers, though they are important. I mean “accessible” more generally. Yes you could build a specific UI for each kind of user, but that seems far less likely to cover as many uses as building one UI that is structured, programmatically navigable, etc.

fxtentacle• 5 months ago

Maybe we just need to go all the way: How about a WASM core with a React GUI that runs inside a custom Electron renderer which outputs the TUI? 100% CPU guaranteed. And you'll never find that important piece of information in an all-monochrome wall of text with no icons. Why use a low-level print() when you could improve your productivity with a high-level framework? /s

dwb15• 5 months ago

Did you reply to the correct post? Can’t see how it follows from mine.

chrysoprace2• 5 months ago

Here's why I use them: many modern graphical applications are extremely wasteful. TUIs are typically small, low footprint applications that don't come bundled with a browser or webview. I don't need yet another electron app for every little thing.

dwb15• 5 months ago

I’m definitely not advocating more little electron apps, and I’m totally with you on TUI’s benefits. I’m bemoaning the lack of imagination that has ended us up here and not in a situation where we can have, say, a small, low-footprint application that can deliver a more structured UI with minimal dependencies. It’s not an impossibility, it’s not even that difficult to imagine, we just don’t have the exact technology.

int_19h3• 5 months ago

TUIs are typically small, low footprint applications

That ship has sailed. These days, TUIs are often Node.js / React monstrosities. Claude Code is a case in point.

worldsayshi• 5 months ago

I think I see your point. I've had it in the back of my head too.

Guess it's like the separation between backend and front-end. When the logic is neatly wrapped in a nice API you can potentially get a lot of reusability from that since the API can be integrated into other things with other use cases.

But a TUI probably doesn't naturally come with a separate backend. However, if a cli is built in a non TUI way it is about as flexible as a backend. Output can be streamed into pipes etc.

I can't stream k9s output into a pipe or variable but I can with kubectl.

Would be nice if we could have the cake and eat it here. Can TUI frameworks encourage having it both ways?

coldtea6• 5 months ago

I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad.

You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Case in point from Emacs/Vim and the Borland IDEs to Claude, plus all kinds of handy utils from mc and htop to mutt.

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

That's not necessarily bad. Not everything has to be open ended.

utilize1808• 5 months ago

How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim?

In many ways, GUI was developed as the natural evolution of TUI. X server, with its client-server architecture, is meant to allow you to interact with remote sessions via "casted" GUI rather than a terminal.

Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason.

TUI just got the nostalgia "coolness".

dwb15• 5 months ago

Funnily, Emacs is getting closer to what I’m after (it’s my main editor).

That's not necessarily bad. Not everything has to be open ended.

I think it is necessarily bad and everything should be open ended. Bad in the sense of low quality, but if we’re talking about critical accessibility (someone is unable to use your application at all), morally bad too.

quotemstr3• 5 months ago

They are GUIs --- just minecraft GUIs. One day, we will rediscover why GUI toolkits exist. The only real advantage TUIs have over GUIs is easy remoting, TBH. Maybe that's enough for people. Otherwise? They're just hair shirts.

jxdxbx3• 5 months ago

I've use Claude to make myself a number of little tools and weird apps that only I would want lately. They need to be cross-platform between Linux and Mac and sometimes Windows. The best approaches I've found are Tauri (+Svelte for making layout easier) for lightweight GUIs but for anything more complex I prefer a TUI. The Ratatui framework works very well. A TUI feels like a "real" app as opposed to a glorified webpage. For actually serious software I'd want a native GUI on each platform.

worthless-trash3• 5 months ago

They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream

Isn't this ... everything though? Even the browser which you mention as better in the next paragraph.

dwb15• 5 months ago

No. The browser structures the page in both a DOM tree and an accessibility tree.

consp• 5 months ago

You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different

So ... Like all Apple products?

dwb15• 5 months ago

Not even close. Apple UIs - despite recent graphical howlers - have excellent accessibility APIs and are regularly praised by people that track such things. I’ve recently been building a macOS app and the UI testing is also based off it. There are apps that allow full keyboard navigation using it. I do agree that the window management side is much less customisable, though, and that does frustrate me.

simgt• 5 months ago

What is great about them is the constraints they impose on the UI designer. I spend so much time finding actions in apps like Zed, Obsidian or Slack because menus and rows of buttons are not cool anymore.

I'd really want explicit UIs from 2000, but in the mean time TUIs feel like an improvement.

dwb15• 5 months ago

I agree about the constraints. My ideal solution would also impose harsh constraints, but would also add just enough structure. I’m also frustrated by each app reinventing the same thing slightly differently.

fyredge• 5 months ago

I don't quite agree with this. Feature discovery is much easier in GUI when most commonly used features are either in the first layer of menu or in standard hotkeys. In the worst case, you would do a search in GUIs that provide them. In CLI / TUI, no such function is present and you would basically have to man and scroll through all possible commands to find it, though I guess grep helps.

einpoklum2• 5 months ago

because menus and rows of buttons are not cool anymore.

They are, which is why most desktop applications use them.

(And please help remind the GNOME people of this fact.)

int_19h3• 5 months ago

Zed has a menu tho?

basilikum• 5 months ago

I like that they are integrated into the terminal and stay in the terminal. For most things my terminal multiplexer is essentially my tiling window manager and everything that breaks out of that via its own window is very unergonomic and breaks the structured logic of my workflow. Technically just having a full GUI inside the boundaries of a terminal would be fine for a lot of things. But it's also one of these things where constraints make a lot of things better. Many GUIs are just really bloated and bad. TUIs just do not allow a lot of the sins of modern GUIs.

I agree that they can get very clunky for non text based tasks or anything where you actually need custom text formating.

dwb15• 5 months ago

Yeah, I sympathise. This is another angle on the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in.

JCattheATM2• 5 months ago

I don't think most GUIs expose any more structure than TUIs.

themafia• 5 months ago

"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.

silon42• 5 months ago

Terminals still have poor keyboard support these days, starting with the Escape key (which should not be ASCII 27 IMO) and various ctrl/shift/alt... key combinations.

d4rkp4ttern• 5 months ago

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/...

mrandish• 5 months ago

Alex,

It's somewhat ironic that a web page about performant terminal user interfaces uses gratuitously complex CSS mask compositing and cubic gradients which reduce smooth scrolling on my 1 year-old, high-end Dell XPS laptop (>$3k) to Commodore 64 level (on default 'Balanced' battery mode). While it's pretty, it's also just a very subtle, non-critical background animation effect. Not being a CSS guru myself, here's what Gemini says:

"Specifically, this is a Scrim or Easing Gradient. Instead of a simple transition between two colors, it uses 16 color stops to mimic a "cubic-bezier" mathematical curve. This creates a smoother, more natural fade than a standard linear gradient, but it forces the browser to calculate high-precision color math across the entire surface during every scroll repaint."

My Firefox smooth scrolls like butter on thousands of pages, so you might want ask your web designer to test on non-Mac, iGPU laptops with hiDPI and consider the performance cost of web pages with always-running subtle background animations in a world of diverse hardware platforms. In case it helps, here's the animation with the gradient layers disabled so you can see all 6,400,000 pixels which are being recalculated every scroll line (https://i.imgur.com/He3RkEu.jpeg).

abelanger4• 5 months ago

You're right - I'll remove that now until we can get it more performant or drop it altogether. This wasn't something we caught during testing. I appreciate the feedback!

zelphirkalt2• 5 months ago

While you are at it, it would be good, if the post was readable at all, without having to run JS on the page.

sedatk3• 5 months ago

to Commodore 64 level

That’s unfair to C64 which can smooth scroll very well.

nine_k• 5 months ago

Not by repainting the whole screen every frame!

npsomaratna• 5 months ago

I owned a C64. Remember how buttery smooth the interfaces of those '80s computers were?

sehugg• 5 months ago

Eh, the NES is better because you get two entire screen buffers. The C-64 gives you only one offscreen row or column to repaint every coarse scroll, and the colormap is fixed so you gotta move all of its bytes while racing the beam.

weinzierl• 5 months ago

Exactly! The C64 could control where the beam started painting. To move the screen a pixel you just wrote the the x and y offsets to two 8-bit I/O registers. Only after scrolling 7 or 8 pixels you had to copy memory around. I was relatively easy to get this right smoothly and since everything was in sync with the beam it was easy to make tear free.

Shaking effects that did not require memory copy were even easier.

khannn• 5 months ago

Notice how many times Claude Code was mentioned in this blog post nee advertisement?

1vuio0pswjnm72• 5 months ago

FWIW, this page looks just fine in a text-only browser running in textmode, no X11, no Javascript, no CSS, on an old, underpowered computer

devmor• 5 months ago

While I agree with your point, I don't understand why you added:

here's what Gemini says

Surely, if people care to see LLM generated text, they can do it themselves.

oblio• 5 months ago

It's a clearly marked quote that adds more details. It's perfectly fine.

NamlchakKhandro• 5 months ago

imagine paying 3k$ for a laptop that can't even handle cubic gradients?

1vuio0pswjnm72• 5 months ago

To read using Firefox, or any browser/HTML pager, without Javascript or CSS:

   (
   printf 'GET /blog/tuis-are-easy-now HTTP/1.0\r\n'
   printf 'Host: hatchet.run\r\n\r\n'
   )|busybox ssl_client hatchet.run \
   |(echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";grep -o "<p.*</p>") > 1.htm
   firefox ./1.htm

Aldipower• 5 months ago

Don't blame my Commodore 64. Once a program is loaded it, runs with 50 or 60hz refresh rate, which is very smooth! Take that! :-)

arjie2• 5 months ago

TUIs are great fun and Claude can make beautiful ones with a little ratatui action super fast. However, the downside of these are that you can't use them with Claude Code so while I have a few I prefer to also have a prompt-response CLI function since that's better for lots of things.

arcanemachiner• 5 months ago

Not sure if this satisfies your requirements, but I've gotten Claude Code to run commands in tmux and view their output (including debugging my NeoVim config), so I think that a TUI is at least accessible, even though it would likely bloat the context window far more than a simple CLI.

SatvikBeri• 5 months ago

Yeah, this is my main way of using Claude Code for anything complex – a REPL or bash window in tmux, and with Claude running commands there. That lets me easily browse through anything that's happened in a UI I'm used to, or manually intervene if needed.

arjie2• 5 months ago

That's pretty nice! It's just the context window problem, yes, but the tmux tip is pretty good nonetheless.

dddgghhbbfblk• 5 months ago

The article talks about this and in fact talks about how one of the advantages of the TUI was that by combining it with `tmux capture-pane` it ended up easier for Claude to use and iterate on, not harder.

dchuk• 5 months ago

This works very well for automated testing from Claude code: https://github.com/pproenca/agent-tui

reactordev• 5 months ago

it's always been easy with ansi... Everyone just thinks it's hard because there's no React for TUI's until recently. '\x1b[' is all you need.

It was good enough for ncurses, it's good enough today.

euoia• 5 months ago

Claude Code has done a good job of building a tui MUD client (I couldn’t find one I liked), and then building a GUI version using Tauri where all the config is shared, so you can run it as either a GUI (on any platform) or TUI. Happy with it so far, and I personally use both TUI mode or GUI mode (with floating panes) depending on what I’m doing.

abelanger4• 5 months ago

Hi everyone, I enjoyed building this TUI for myself and wanted to write down how I did it. I appreciate all the thoughts and feedback! The web app is our main investment, but I think there's a slice of developers who really like to interact with TUIs, so I'm going to keep working on it.

For the demo at https://tui.hatchet.run, to answer some messages asking about it: I built this with the fantastic ghostty-web project (https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web). It's been a while since I've used WASM for anything and this made it really easy. I deployed the demo across six Fly.io regions (hooray stateless apps) to try to minimize the impact of keystroke latency, but I imagine it's still felt by quite a few people.

ghostly_s• 5 months ago

Were TUIs hard before?

dudewhocodes• 5 months ago

"Building X is easy now"... it was never hard if you had the patience to read docs.

We should be saying "Building X is faster now" instead. But I guess that doesn't induce god complex that effectively.

nchmy• 5 months ago

I never turn down a chance to plug my favourite TUI - jjui, for controlling jj vcs. Life changing combination (and jjui is built with Charm)

https://github.com/idursun/jjui/

Systemmanic• 5 months ago

TUI: Terminal User Interface

mvkel• 5 months ago

The Hatchet TUI is not well supported on mobile devices.

Isn't everyone else remoting into a Claude instance on their phones?

jandy• 5 months ago

Primary driver for me (finally) learning tmux.

bronlund• 5 months ago

I love Claude Code, but how they made the TUI is just plain stupid. Not how it looks, but you know, the React part.

stingraycharles• 5 months ago

It’s a very cumbersome UI that feels extremely bloated. Especially if you have a lot of text you want to scroll over — eg i want to see the details of the last X exchanges - it just performs absolutely horribly.

It seems like it already was like this from the start, though? I’m not a frontend / TUI dev, but why are these issues so hard to fix?

wpm• 5 months ago

It's just architected poorly. The job of putting text on a screen fast has been solved for 50 years.

charcircuit4• 5 months ago

If the render is already made in JavaScript it makes sense to reuse react as the reconciliation engine instead of building one from scratch.

LAC-Tech• 5 months ago

What is a "reconciliation engine" and why does a TUI need one?

troupo8• 5 months ago

No, no it makes exactly zero sense to have a "reconciliation engine" or React in a TUI. There's nothing to reconcile. You can just output a stream of characters as fast as they appear.

tekawade• 5 months ago

Looks great. Curious why not choose Rust and do extension of https://ratatui.rs/?

jvanderbot• 5 months ago

Yeah, whenever I hear "Building a TUI is easy now" I imagine someone just discovered ratatui.

d0mine• 5 months ago

There are also other frameworks that make it easy to create TUI eg Textual (in Python) https://textual.textualize.io/

hinkley• 5 months ago

I haven’t done much with Claude code yet but I’ve watched some rather recent videos of other people leverage it to get work done and I couldn’t help thinking, are we going to end up with a similar UI but with fully deterministic “agents” at the end of this hype cycle.

All of the skills I saw demonstrated were deterministic. So does this end in a Functional Core, Imperative Shell scenario that looks like a Terraform Plan and a search engine-style natural language processor out front?

theYipster• 5 months ago

With Claude, I built a TUI for managing QEMU/KVM VMs (Rust with ratatui.) Solves a lot of problems I had with virt-manager, so I made it a FOSSS project. https://www.vm-curator.org.

neomantra• 5 months ago

Building a TUI was easy before, especially with the great toolsets for their respective languages BubbleTea / Textualize / Ratatui. And thanks to those frameworks, LLMs can manifest useful tools.

Similar to WebApps, it's only since the November'25 renaissance that I felt I could use them to create TUIs. Once I had that revelation, I started going into my backlog and using it.

I maintain a TUI Charting library, NTCharts. In January, I fixed a bug - totally obvious once identified - that I personally failed to find earlier. But the test harness, prompting, and Gemini got it done [1]. Gemini's spatial understanding was critical in completing the task.

I've been vibe-crafting a local LLM conversation viewing tool called thinkt. After scraping ~/.claude and making a data model, this is the point in PROMPTS.md where I start creating the TUI using BubbleTea. [2].

[1] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/issues/7#issuecomm...

[2] https://github.com/wethinkt/go-thinkt/blob/main/PROMPTS.md#2...

pjmlp• 5 months ago

Building TUIs was already super easy in 1990 with Turbo Vision and Clipper on MS-DOS, with compiled languages (TP, xBase), using super fast build times on systems running at 10 Mhz, within 640 KB.

dardeaup• 5 months ago

Absolutely correct! We've lost a lot along the way.

1313ed013• 5 months ago

I built a TUI application for MS-DOS (well, DOSBox) recently, just using the few functions in MSC 5.1's included graphics library (plus a few simple BIOS calls) and what a joy compared to web interfaces or any GUI library I have used. Having a fixed screen size and known, limited, character set is at least developer-friendly. Of course there existed more advanced libraries as well, but for a simple TUI just a few functions can go a long way.

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/TOOLS...

shevy-java• 5 months ago

Notably this was the first time I felt that using Claude Code for something non-arbitrary was significantly faster than doing it myself

Well, it is like code completion on a higher level.

I still don't like this approach. Besides, who is going to maintain that code? Such code will probably forever be required to be maitnained via Claude. So no humans involved. Just autogenerated stuff. I dislike this idea a lot.

Humans are slower, ok, but they built excellent software before Claude. What is coming next? Claude Linux-like Kernel? Top500 supercomputers will run it?

abelanger4• 5 months ago

Author here - I'm also generally skeptical of coding agents, but with the right problem domain and approach they can produce quality output when paired with humans. There was a point in time in the chess world where computer + human was stronger than computer or human alone. I think we're in that era for a handful of applications. Not for things like kernels, browsers, or databases.

Besides, who is going to maintain that code?

I maintain the code. If Claude gets sunset tomorrow, I'll still be able to maintain and write it - I've already rewritten parts of it.

You could make the same argument for a team member leading a project that you've worked on. Is that code forever required to be maintained by one team member?

Previously the overhead of ensuring code quality when the development process was driven by Claude Code was greater than just writing the code myself. But that was different for this project.

bob10292• 5 months ago

I genuinely don't understand the TUI obsession for LLM applications.

Go watch copilot drive VS2026 if you've never seen it in action. There is no way you are going to be able to communicate this same amount of information via plain text in the same amount of time. I can catch a lot of bad stuff mid-flight because I can actually multitask my UI and click into diffs as files are edited in real time.

madeofpalk• 5 months ago

Yeah. I prefer the smarts of Claude code, but the GitHub copilot UI in vs code is much better, especially for previewing ai diffs.

I was (am) excited for vs codes new native Claude code integration, but it’s pretty buggy and unreliable.

nip• 5 months ago

The reason is simple: the TUI is the fastest way to provide any form of UI over the file system.

Want to do that with web technologies? You’ll need a browser AND a server or build an app using electron or tauri.

bob10292• 5 months ago

I don't disagree. However, the TUI seems to have become the final destination for some major AI vendors. This doesn't look like a stepping stone to me.

esafak2• 5 months ago

How fast does it need to be? We're talking about LLMs that run in the cloud here.

MrJohz• 5 months ago

I don't use VSCode as my editor, but I found out recently you can open the AI agent sidebar as a separate window, and it's been fantastic - it's mostly replaced Claude Code and other similar TUI tools. It's not quite full integration, but the UI is so much easier to use, because you can be more precise. Rather than having a global "more information" toggle that expands everything like in Claude Code or Pi or whatever, I can specifically inspect the bits of information that I'm interested in. There's two parallel subagents running and one of them is doing unusual things? I can explore exactly what it's doing in more detail.

It helps that VSCode has really improved in the last couple of releases - before then, the features available in Claude Code were useful though that it was worth using despite the baggage, and there's still a handful of things I miss in VSCode. But I think the visual information density and acuity that you can get out of a GUI application is far beyond what you can ever achieve in a TUI, and I think as these tools start reaching something like feature parity, that makes GUIs a lot nicer to use.

Marazan• 5 months ago

It's LARPing.

Everyone knows all the best programmers are using the command line firing off one line Awk scripts that look like runic incantations occasionally opening vim to do stuff at blazing warp speed.

So the AI tools people build want to take on those trappings to convince people they are serious tools for grown ups.

Ignore that they are basically a full web stack React/CSS conglomeration - feel the L33t hackerness of 'using the command line'. No IDE like a scrub developer you are using a text console, you are a real programmer now.

anthk• 5 months ago

Actual hackers will use AWK and anything else... over Acme under 9front which is pretty much graphical, and current Emacs users will use a graphical setup with tons of keybindings, commands and Elisp functions. The best of both worlds. You have both the scriptability, keyboard shortcuts and mouse for selection and quick pointng.

rcarmo• 5 months ago

Doesn’t work on an iPad. It’s not that hard to fix, but shows that the fundamentals of input handling and accessibility aren’t there.

efilife• 5 months ago

I knew this would be ANOTHER ai glazing post before even clicking. I think we must specify if a post is about AI in titles. Another "I built X" with AI really brings nothing to the table, and I've seen a few users agree with me on this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46580844

Here's a similar situation, a submission called "webdev is fun again", and what you find inside is just gushing about how good AI is. Genuinely what value does it bring? I think this phenomenon is literally "clickbaiting" but on hackernews

Other users from here seem to see the same thing that I do:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008412

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47010624

Y-bar2• 5 months ago

Hey! This looks great, and I appreciate the effort! But just opening the page at https://tui.hatchet.run/ causes my (admittedly old Intel i7 9700K) to spin up its fans and consume >30% of the CPU without me even doing anything. I don't think a TUI should do that.

I was also intrigued by it being a lot of Go dependencies as I have developed a bit of a fancy for this language recently.

abelanger4• 5 months ago

Hi, thanks! To be clear, the demo there is merely a WASM-based Ghostty build which is rendering the TUI on a web page, just so people could try it out without needing to install anything. The actual TUI runs in your terminal. I'm guessing it's the WASM side of things causing the fans to spin, which you wouldn't see locally.

fl0id• 5 months ago

It’s not easy to build a good tui though. Like fe compare Claude code and opencode. Opencode is an atrocious approximation of a window system as a tui.

4nonverbal-alit• 5 months ago

TUI may look good on the surface, but I’d really appreciate to see a good descriptive logs instead of a fancy progress bar

Tepix• 5 months ago

What‘s the TUI equivalent for mobile apps? Big UI elements and text, iOS 1-6 style, rendered without bitmap graphics?

I.e. something that is lightweight, lightning fast, great to use with just a thumb or so and looks a bit boring and dated, yet also inviting?

JSR_FDED• 5 months ago

Turbo C++ was peak TUI. Even on hardware thousands of times slower than today it had that instantaneous wired-to-the-machine feeling that I rarely experience today.

hamdouni• 5 months ago

Using librairies, building TUI was easy before AI too.

swordsith• 5 months ago

The cursor CLI was a great springboard for me to make my own frontend to prompt from, I would never use it though god, I implemented git, difs, and chat histories, so i can use it easily from my phone with tailscale. It picks up on my rules and can grep my project, so easy. https://imgur.com/a/HZOEvr7

cpard• 5 months ago

Building TUIs might be easy now but building good user experience on a TUI is feels harder than ever has been to me. The modern libraries make a lot of things easy but we are currently pushing terminals far beyond what they were designed for.

Claude Code et.al. are good examples of that. Diffs, user approval flows, non-linear flows in general and a ton of text buffered are all elements that we know really well how to handle in web interfaces but are challenging for the terminal.

Building a TUI is easy now

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