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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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 :)
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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/
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.
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!
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.
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 -- deploying the TUI requires zero user involvement.
Claude code amplified the trend hundred fold but there was already a significant increase of TUI since the days of go fzf, rust ratatui and python rich.
My bet would be a desire to do away with heavy browser based UI and the curiosity of trying to test the limits of terminal based rendering.
TUI is popular because a) there are no native GUI frameworks for simple tools that are easy, fast, and simple to develop in at the same time, and b) low fidelity lets you pretend being a UI/UX developer without really being one. The rest is abysmal. It's not automatable at all (the article is wrong on that point), less readable (monospace/no images), very limited (try making a DAW in it...), relies on a ton of ancient cruft in Unix-related terminals, it's not really portable etc etc.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Which is why I never went with CapsLock being both Ctrl and Escape depending of whether it's part of a key combo because it's whole setup. On the contrary, whenever I use someone else's machine I can quickly go in the settings, set the option and then set it off after I am done.
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...)
remapping capslock to esc is something nobody whom i've shamed into doing can go back from. it's just night and day. i've been thinking lately that the reason we need hjkl is vim is because the keyboard layout is actually bad for arrows. on typewriters there was no arrows, but on a computer arrows are of primary importance. i think the spacebar doesn't need to be so big, there's no reason for it to be available to both thumbs, and i think moving the small set of arrows into the left or right part of the spacebar position would be so much better for typing because the hjkl hack only work in hacker editors, but we need to use arrows a lot on normal software and it's super bad for your hand if you use it a lot. i started developing inflamations because of the way i fold my thumb to reach for the arrows without moving my entire hand.
> i think the spacebar doesn't need to be so big, there's no reason for it to be available to both thumbs
This is why I love JIS, even though I don't actually need the Japanese keys. That small spacebar is so much better, and you get three extra keys (Henkan, Muhenkan and Kana) along the bottom row. As an Emacs user, I bind Henkan and Muhenkan to be Control keys. It's very comfortable.
I was just thinking this today tweaking the layout on my lilypad58, a layout I don't love and kept arriving at, "I just want more modifiers". Using JIS is genius.
Weirdly enough I actually like that Esc is so far away and it is not for efficiency but for ergonomics. It forces me to lift my hand up and reposition it away from the home row and back so I'm forced to move muscles that would otherwise just wait around and collect RSI points. I tend to use the arrow keys often as well for the same reason on the other hand (although I do still use hjkl quite a bit still)
Yes but then you get used to jj (or jk) which might not be available on other vi modes (shells vi modes, gdb, glide browser ?) and it's overall quite nice to quickly escape any situation by having the key be closer.
Ctrl + [ would be acceptable if it wasn't, imo, the most important function of the editor.
I've yet to come across something with vim bindings that lacks a .vimrc where you can map 'jk'. Either way, switching back to ESC is as annoying as it is in the first place.
Not sure if this is bad form but i’ve always loved using jk for escape. It feels so natural to roll your index and middle fingers to get back to normal mode.
I agree, too, besides reminding myself to use numbers before movement commands there was really nothing that felt super hard about vim. It almost disappointed me, I always heard the jokes about not being able to quit it!
Yes but jk does not work in other contexts (shell vi modes at least for me) and it's actually to have Escape closer to home to quickly get out of a situation
To be fair I mostly use `/` + (n/N) + Enter with `incsearch` on (by default in nvim), I feel it's really the superior way to move around and it has deprecated a lot of my vim-fu.
In the same way, apart from occasinal `ciw` (or other text-objects), I do most of my edits with `:s/old/new`. I don't even use a complicated regex as sometimes it's just easier to write one or two simpler ones. It's just faster to not have to go to a specific location before you make an edit.
Because Ctrl+C for the most important function of you editor kinda sucks ? I mean you can get used to it, but you can get used to anything. Maybe we can have nice things ?
You know that CTRL + [ functions same as ESC right? Sr. dev at my job told me about this a year ago and it made vim SIGNIFICANTLY more comfortable to use day to day.
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
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.
Arcane build system. I mean, I guess it technically supports CMake these days, but I have never been able to get anyone else's Qt project to build without much gnashing of teeth.
Emulated native widgets try for pixel-perfect, but tend to feel wrong somehow.
> Gtk
Outside of a Linux/Gtk native environment, Gtk applications are awful. Take GIMP on macOS, for example: it's had window focus issues (export dialog getting lost behind the main application window) literally ever since Gtk on macOS dropped the XQuartz dependence. And that's the flagship application for the toolkit.
To me the worst case is trying to develop some small utility like a tool to search in files using regex. Because if you are developing something large, the amount of time you spend dealing with packaging, distribution, etc., is small and you don't care about file sizes.
But if I want to, say, develop the app for Windows. That is easy. You get a tiny binary to just opens a form and runs with a double click. No install necessary.
The same thing on Linux? Impossible. There is no guarantee the machine has any version of GTK or Qt installed at all, so to be self-contained you need to ship the entire OS. Now your file size is huge. I can't use Python, because now Windows users need to have Python or I have to ship an interpreter.
The only plausible alternative is something like Java. Now you have a single .jar file that runs on any system. But then Oracle changed the license, and JavaFX is no longer part of Java (Swing still is).
Honestly, I just want to display a menubar with keyboard shortcuts. Why can't there be a menubar VM or something that gives me access to a menubar on all OS's without having to deal with all of this. We are already shipping the entire browser with Electron. That is stupid. The way it should work is users install a something like Flash but for desktop apps and every app just uses that platform.
It's probably easier to ship a DOS game than a desktop app because everyone who wants to run a DOS game will just have a DOS emulator installed.
What I mean is that on Windows you can just ship an 100kb .exe and forget about it and it's still going to work 20 years later.
On Linux that doesn't happen. First of all you HAVE to ship the source code if you want it to keep working on every machine because people need to compile it on their machine for it to work, so you're practically forced to open source your desktop app. I know the notion of having a closed source app on Linux sounds weird, but it's more weird that this isn't an option as a side-effect of the how the whole system is designed. Second of all, even if you do ship the source code, you're going to be forced to maintain it. If you made an app in GTK 1 (which looks beautiful, by the way, compared to modern GTK), people won't be able to just install it because GTK 1 is so old that it's no longer in the repositories.
An app made in Java 8 runs in the modern VM. An app made for Windows 95 still runs on modern Windows.
It's only on Linux that I feel like the developer is pressured to open source it and make it the user's problem because the system won't provide support.
Zed did. I know it has it's fans, but it doesn't seem to be generating a stampede of adoption despite what looks like a monumental effort to build a GUI system from the ground up.
Their GUI system (GPUI) is not very mature for use outside of Zed. GPUI is basically a UI framework in the truest sense: a framework for building UIs. It has core functionality for async execution, an ECS for grabbing shared resources, and a div.
It's basically like building a website with div and basic CSS.
Up until sometime late 2025 GPUI wasn't even on crates.io, and it seems like the GPUI-component ecosystem still promotes using git deps. It was also in "read the code for docs" state for a very long time
It's been a while since I've used it, but there were weird things missing too like the Scollbar was located in Zed's UI component crates instead of core GPUI. Arbitrary text selection also is not possible, which is something I really value about egui.
What I do not like on Zed or electron GUIs is lack of customization. Older IDEs using sdks like Swing, JWT, QT, GTK etc. allowed user to design its user interface using drag and drop. ie compare older IDEs like eclipse or idea and try to create layout which fills screen with information important for you. And then try to do the same with vscode or zed. I like functionality and speed of zed but UI customization is too limited for me. It might be design choice or sdk limit I am not sure.
I mean, both wxWidgets and Qt are fine, no? GTK 2 and 3 as well (4+ is... meh). There are plenty applications using one of these (often via python bindings).
I think it is more of a staffing problem. Plenty of people know web development, so you want to use those people for desktop as well. Having desktop be JS (electron) helps a lot with that.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.
If you:
1. Have a low-latency connection to a decent machine, and
2. Are on a machine that's weak, or isn't yours, or that you don't fully control (e.g. employer forces you to run Windows)
My motivation is avoiding all the piles and piles of extra software dependencies that X and/or Wayland bring in.
In addition (but might only be relevant in my niche platform) is that Wayland is buggy and X is deprecated and unmaintained making making the GUI work there a constant struggle.
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).
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.
99% of LLM-adjacent software is webslop in a state of perpetually broken churn.
OpenCode for example has not yet figured out "maintain a log of all messages and send that log to the SSE endpoint in the same order to get the next response" and has regular prompt cache misses even with context pruning disabled
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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....
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 handle all of it for you. I still prefer TUIs but you can have nice looking GUI apps for when you want them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
What does it matter how fragmented the platforms are? I feel like this isn't sinking in with people. I was chatting with a friend last night about a SwiftUI app that I'd built and he'd pitched in on. He then reimplemented --- didn't port it, reimplemented it, for WinUI, that night, with just a couple prompts.
I am, in a proverbial sense, buying puts on Electron.
Yes. Developers are conditioned to expect the only convenient answer is a TUI (actually, a CLI; TUIs are show-off projects most of the time) and, if you really want to go all out, Electron. That's not the case anymore.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TUIs are terrible UX. - Please select this text with your mouse. Are you scrolling where are you it’s all like legos.
Bad UX has been normalised so far that people write whole articles set in this anti-world, “why TUIs are back”..
The whole situation is like if we invented flying cars, but to get to the parking, we must ride horses because regular cars are not good enough now that we have flying ones, and horses are cheaper and you can ride them without a licence.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
Claude code is almost there
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/theres-a-react-app-running-...
Claude code is react and their desktop app is Electron. But “coding is largely a solved problem”.
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.
Can’t say that electron does not encourage bad software, quite the opposite
It's an example of bad code that further encourages more bad code.
Always has been.
I really wish that 1Password wasn’t an electron app. Or Spotify. (Maybe I should just use Spotify in the browser).
We need to advocate and evangelize for native apps, like RapidApi on macOS and also Tower.
> shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end
A significant number of these apps are nodejs apps so it’s not that much of a leap!
Yeah, I noticed some TUI libraries in npm when I was working on a Typescript project a couple of years back so I'm sure people are doing it.
Just wait till you hear about the wonders of React + Ink! Now you can have JS bloat in your terminal too!
Jokes aside, I don't understand how devs can bring themselves to ship such inefficient apps.
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.
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...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001905
Nailed it!
Did Hiro even use a keyboard? I remember everything was VR in Snow Crash.
I, of course, pretend I'm Zero Cool.
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.
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.
> since ages immortal
since time immemorial?
3rd Sept 1189.
Anything after that is time memorial I guess.
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 :)
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Not anymore it isn't. "Claude, make this a web app".
Just what I need! A bloated react app to manage my systemd units
Just use something like Tk or wxWidgets.
So just tell it html only if you want.
A browser is OOM more expensive to run than a terminal app, regardless of what you're running inside said browser
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can make even lighter weight and just as keyboard driven GUIs. The only downside, as you say, is them not integrating with Tmux.
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.
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.
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?
I associate CLI prompt and typing 100wpm and lots of scrolling logs with l33t, but claude code is more 1992 DOS program vibes.
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.
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
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.
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/
Cool, 1st I've heard of nono.sh. FWIW I've been happy w smolmachines microvms.
I'm on the $100/m plan and it works.
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?
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.
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!
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.
Can it be much more simple of a reason and that tuis fit into many of our existing tmux based work flows?
"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"
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 -- deploying the TUI requires zero user involvement.
I don't think that's true, because it appears to me that the upswing in new TUI programs predates Claude Code's takeoff.
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.
What a fascinating modern age we live in.
I'm still motivated to adopt a TUI application in lieu of a pure CLI or GUI because of the ability to use it over SSH.
Claude code amplified the trend hundred fold but there was already a significant increase of TUI since the days of go fzf, rust ratatui and python rich.
My bet would be a desire to do away with heavy browser based UI and the curiosity of trying to test the limits of terminal based rendering.
TUI is popular because a) there are no native GUI frameworks for simple tools that are easy, fast, and simple to develop in at the same time, and b) low fidelity lets you pretend being a UI/UX developer without really being one. The rest is abysmal. It's not automatable at all (the article is wrong on that point), less readable (monospace/no images), very limited (try making a DAW in it...), relies on a ton of ancient cruft in Unix-related terminals, it's not really portable etc etc.
The TUI version of ClaudeCode is not even that good compared even to the VSCode plugin.
How come?
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.
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.
I've been using openbox for decades now. It doesn't get in the way, and I don't need more.
> 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.
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.
Ctrl-[ is accepted across Vim installs
Which is why I never went with CapsLock being both Ctrl and Escape depending of whether it's part of a key combo because it's whole setup. On the contrary, whenever I use someone else's machine I can quickly go in the settings, set the option and then set it off after I am done.
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...)
If only keyboard makers would just always put escape there.
It should always be "hold for control" and "tap for esc".
remapping capslock to esc is something nobody whom i've shamed into doing can go back from. it's just night and day. i've been thinking lately that the reason we need hjkl is vim is because the keyboard layout is actually bad for arrows. on typewriters there was no arrows, but on a computer arrows are of primary importance. i think the spacebar doesn't need to be so big, there's no reason for it to be available to both thumbs, and i think moving the small set of arrows into the left or right part of the spacebar position would be so much better for typing because the hjkl hack only work in hacker editors, but we need to use arrows a lot on normal software and it's super bad for your hand if you use it a lot. i started developing inflamations because of the way i fold my thumb to reach for the arrows without moving my entire hand.
> i think the spacebar doesn't need to be so big, there's no reason for it to be available to both thumbs
This is why I love JIS, even though I don't actually need the Japanese keys. That small spacebar is so much better, and you get three extra keys (Henkan, Muhenkan and Kana) along the bottom row. As an Emacs user, I bind Henkan and Muhenkan to be Control keys. It's very comfortable.
I was just thinking this today tweaking the layout on my lilypad58, a layout I don't love and kept arriving at, "I just want more modifiers". Using JIS is genius.
Weirdly enough I actually like that Esc is so far away and it is not for efficiency but for ergonomics. It forces me to lift my hand up and reposition it away from the home row and back so I'm forced to move muscles that would otherwise just wait around and collect RSI points. I tend to use the arrow keys often as well for the same reason on the other hand (although I do still use hjkl quite a bit still)
Map to "jj" and call it a day since your finger is already on the home row
Also ctrl + [ is standard terminal/ascii for esc so that might be a bit more ergonomic than reaching for esc
Yes but then you get used to jj (or jk) which might not be available on other vi modes (shells vi modes, gdb, glide browser ?) and it's overall quite nice to quickly escape any situation by having the key be closer.
Ctrl + [ would be acceptable if it wasn't, imo, the most important function of the editor.
EDIT: My bad, you can do it with Glide apparently
I've yet to come across something with vim bindings that lacks a .vimrc where you can map 'jk'. Either way, switching back to ESC is as annoying as it is in the first place.
Well I have given at least one example. Do you not use bash/zsh/fish/nushell vi modes ?
Do you not use web search to verify assumptions ?
"jk" is even faster (you get to "roll" your fingers)
Not sure if this is bad form but i’ve always loved using jk for escape. It feels so natural to roll your index and middle fingers to get back to normal mode.
I agree, too, besides reminding myself to use numbers before movement commands there was really nothing that felt super hard about vim. It almost disappointed me, I always heard the jokes about not being able to quit it!
Yes but jk does not work in other contexts (shell vi modes at least for me) and it's actually to have Escape closer to home to quickly get out of a situation
To be fair I mostly use `/` + (n/N) + Enter with `incsearch` on (by default in nvim), I feel it's really the superior way to move around and it has deprecated a lot of my vim-fu.
In the same way, apart from occasinal `ciw` (or other text-objects), I do most of my edits with `:s/old/new`. I don't even use a complicated regex as sometimes it's just easier to write one or two simpler ones. It's just faster to not have to go to a specific location before you make an edit.
It works in bash and zsh at least.
> The only hard part about vim is to be forced to strecth the finger up to Escape
I still don't understand why people keep mentioning this, ctrl-c works as well to go back to the normal mode.
> windows you just have to edit (create?) a registry key
Or use Powertoys, which I don't know why it isn't a setting.
(saying as a Mac, Linux and Emacs user, although I still use Vim in the terminal)
Because Ctrl+C for the most important function of you editor kinda sucks ? I mean you can get used to it, but you can get used to anything. Maybe we can have nice things ?
Also just to be pedantic: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5036294/10469162
You know that CTRL + [ functions same as ESC right? Sr. dev at my job told me about this a year ago and it made vim SIGNIFICANTLY more comfortable to use day to day.
I’ve been using vim bindings for a decade and never knew this…
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.
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
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.
I don't really want Dart tbh
I don't think it is lack of investment necessarily, so much as not building the right thing.
What we need is a framework that is easy to use, cross platform, open source, and ideally can be used from your programming language of choice.
You are not going to believe this... (joking)
Are the available FOSS cross-platform frameworks really not that good?
There's at least Qt, GTK, umm, and, I guess Juce and wxWindows, right? Oh, I see there are more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G...
Can you explain what's deficient about the first two I mentioned?
> Qt
Arcane build system. I mean, I guess it technically supports CMake these days, but I have never been able to get anyone else's Qt project to build without much gnashing of teeth.
Emulated native widgets try for pixel-perfect, but tend to feel wrong somehow.
> Gtk
Outside of a Linux/Gtk native environment, Gtk applications are awful. Take GIMP on macOS, for example: it's had window focus issues (export dialog getting lost behind the main application window) literally ever since Gtk on macOS dropped the XQuartz dependence. And that's the flagship application for the toolkit.
GTK 3 hello world is 150-200mb. They really messed up since GTK 2 was 30mb (like macOS AppKit).
To me the worst case is trying to develop some small utility like a tool to search in files using regex. Because if you are developing something large, the amount of time you spend dealing with packaging, distribution, etc., is small and you don't care about file sizes.
But if I want to, say, develop the app for Windows. That is easy. You get a tiny binary to just opens a form and runs with a double click. No install necessary.
The same thing on Linux? Impossible. There is no guarantee the machine has any version of GTK or Qt installed at all, so to be self-contained you need to ship the entire OS. Now your file size is huge. I can't use Python, because now Windows users need to have Python or I have to ship an interpreter.
The only plausible alternative is something like Java. Now you have a single .jar file that runs on any system. But then Oracle changed the license, and JavaFX is no longer part of Java (Swing still is).
Honestly, I just want to display a menubar with keyboard shortcuts. Why can't there be a menubar VM or something that gives me access to a menubar on all OS's without having to deal with all of this. We are already shipping the entire browser with Electron. That is stupid. The way it should work is users install a something like Flash but for desktop apps and every app just uses that platform.
It's probably easier to ship a DOS game than a desktop app because everyone who wants to run a DOS game will just have a DOS emulator installed.
> There is no guarantee the machine has any version of GTK or Qt installed at all, so to be self-contained
So don't be self-contained. I mean, you depend on an X server or Wayland, right? So why not depend on GTK or Qt being available?
(Of course, it _is_ tricky to be able to depend on any of several versions of these, but still.)
What I mean is that on Windows you can just ship an 100kb .exe and forget about it and it's still going to work 20 years later.
On Linux that doesn't happen. First of all you HAVE to ship the source code if you want it to keep working on every machine because people need to compile it on their machine for it to work, so you're practically forced to open source your desktop app. I know the notion of having a closed source app on Linux sounds weird, but it's more weird that this isn't an option as a side-effect of the how the whole system is designed. Second of all, even if you do ship the source code, you're going to be forced to maintain it. If you made an app in GTK 1 (which looks beautiful, by the way, compared to modern GTK), people won't be able to just install it because GTK 1 is so old that it's no longer in the repositories.
An app made in Java 8 runs in the modern VM. An app made for Windows 95 still runs on modern Windows.
It's only on Linux that I feel like the developer is pressured to open source it and make it the user's problem because the system won't provide support.
I want to say you could statically link a GUI application, but I'm pretty sure libpthread doesn't cooperate on static linking.
libpthread is fine with static linking. Where you run into issues is libraries like libresolv that use configuration files in a specific path.
Zed did. I know it has it's fans, but it doesn't seem to be generating a stampede of adoption despite what looks like a monumental effort to build a GUI system from the ground up.
Their GUI system (GPUI) is not very mature for use outside of Zed. GPUI is basically a UI framework in the truest sense: a framework for building UIs. It has core functionality for async execution, an ECS for grabbing shared resources, and a div.
It's basically like building a website with div and basic CSS.
gpui-component exists: https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component
Up until sometime late 2025 GPUI wasn't even on crates.io, and it seems like the GPUI-component ecosystem still promotes using git deps. It was also in "read the code for docs" state for a very long time
It's been a while since I've used it, but there were weird things missing too like the Scollbar was located in Zed's UI component crates instead of core GPUI. Arbitrary text selection also is not possible, which is something I really value about egui.
What I do not like on Zed or electron GUIs is lack of customization. Older IDEs using sdks like Swing, JWT, QT, GTK etc. allowed user to design its user interface using drag and drop. ie compare older IDEs like eclipse or idea and try to create layout which fills screen with information important for you. And then try to do the same with vscode or zed. I like functionality and speed of zed but UI customization is too limited for me. It might be design choice or sdk limit I am not sure.
I mean, both wxWidgets and Qt are fine, no? GTK 2 and 3 as well (4+ is... meh). There are plenty applications using one of these (often via python bindings).
I think it is more of a staffing problem. Plenty of people know web development, so you want to use those people for desktop as well. Having desktop be JS (electron) helps a lot with that.
A year ago I would have agreed with you, but now anyone can build a perfectly reasonable native app.
What is native on Linux?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.
If you:
1. Have a low-latency connection to a decent machine, and 2. Are on a machine that's weak, or isn't yours, or that you don't fully control (e.g. employer forces you to run Windows)
... then you live in remote X apps my friend.
> It's just a shame that we don't have a great cross-platform, streamed, UI system.
It's called the web/Jupyter. And no, web-driven UI doesn't have to be heavyweight either, any more than HN is.
i am experimenting with TUI/GUI.
My motivation is avoiding all the piles and piles of extra software dependencies that X and/or Wayland bring in.
In addition (but might only be relevant in my niche platform) is that Wayland is buggy and X is deprecated and unmaintained making making the GUI work there a constant struggle.
Time will tell if it is an improvement
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).
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.
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.
99% of LLM-adjacent software is webslop in a state of perpetually broken churn.
OpenCode for example has not yet figured out "maintain a log of all messages and send that log to the SSE endpoint in the same order to get the next response" and has regular prompt cache misses even with context pruning disabled
Return to the halcyon security era of curl piped into bash
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
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.
Check out the Crush agent harness. It's very impressive.
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.
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.
The xfce folks are keeping GTK+ 3.x around, mostly for its advanced theming support. Isn't that quite enough?
I didn't realise. That's good news. Whether it's enough, I don't know the UI space well enough to say.
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
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.
> - 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.
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.
I like TUIs for a lot of reasons, but this one might be the biggest.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
TUIs don't use the command line (ie bash, fish, etc), though. They use ncurses
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
[1] https://terminaltrove.com/explore/
[2] https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix
Even before Claude Code, I always see htop as the prime example of a good TUI.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Where would one go to familiarize one's self with Flutter and with dart?
https://flutter.dev/
https://dart.dev/
https://dartpad.dev/
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....
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 handle all of it for you. I still prefer TUIs but you can have nice looking GUI apps for when you want them.
Cuz they're cheap and people don't care. Same reason by electron interfaces are so common
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I think TUIs have started to become popular again a few years ago, before Claude Code was released?
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.
TUIs are extremely more portable, and offer a more uniform UX across platforms.
Shoutout to k9s. Fantastic tool.
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.
Somewhat ironic is that people are using them to create generic web apps like they are going out of fashion.
Luke Smith was too early on this.
It was always there. k9s for instance, it started getting noticed recently. With coding agents, it is even easier to build.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, I've definitely seen the results. :) But it's nice when people don't do that.
> 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.
Claude Code is 600 Kloc... insanity. It's definitely possible to write crap TUIs.
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.
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.
TUIs are back because the web got too bloated.
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.
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.
Idk, it's pretty trivial to set up a TUI with bubbletea or ratatui, and I assume other languages have similar libraries.
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.
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?
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.
if ai makes native rewrites cheap, "write once run anywhere" matters a lot less. tuis stick around for dev workflows, not for shipping to users.
I do get that, but developers like native UI too. You can tell by how much we gripe about Electron!
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.
What does it matter how fragmented the platforms are? I feel like this isn't sinking in with people. I was chatting with a friend last night about a SwiftUI app that I'd built and he'd pitched in on. He then reimplemented --- didn't port it, reimplemented it, for WinUI, that night, with just a couple prompts.
I am, in a proverbial sense, buying puts on Electron.
I agree, the LLM porting things is a game changer.
Does it also follow that we can have pretty much any shape for valuable apps? API, CLI, TUI, Web, SwiftUI, WinUI...
Yes. Developers are conditioned to expect the only convenient answer is a TUI (actually, a CLI; TUIs are show-off projects most of the time) and, if you really want to go all out, Electron. That's not the case anymore.
Why not instead have Linux just run Win32 applications?
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.
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.
Why? All the great designers I've worked with would have shivers shooting up their spine after looking at that screenshot.
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.
> 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"?
VB6 was the peak of desktop GUI app development change my mind
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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."
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.
They were never really gone, just maybe introduced to a new audience a little more lately which is great.
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.
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.
Hate to be this guy but it’s Xerox PARC, not Park.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> TUIs are Back
Citation needed?
TUIs are terrible UX. - Please select this text with your mouse. Are you scrolling where are you it’s all like legos.
Bad UX has been normalised so far that people write whole articles set in this anti-world, “why TUIs are back”..
The whole situation is like if we invented flying cars, but to get to the parking, we must ride horses because regular cars are not good enough now that we have flying ones, and horses are cheaper and you can ride them without a licence.
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.
Fashion is a big driver for sure but TUIs do have advantages over GUIs that are real, especially for powerusers.