TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

Posted by mipselaer 10 hours ago

TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool(tui.studio)

445 points | 251 commentspage 2

fidotron 9 hours ago|

This is going to end up with TUIs that resemble old BBS ANSI art, such as https://16colo.rs/

It completely misses the reason people like current TUIs.

drob518 7 hours ago||

I agree. The animation on the site lost me when it placed a button. IMO, buttons are not part of TUIs. Those are just low-resolution GUIs, IMO, and that’s sort of the worst of all worlds. The first good TUIs were things like top and elm.

lsaferite 8 hours ago|||

FWIW, I still love to see the old BBS UIs and ANSI art. But that's probably just nostalgia talking.

calgoo 7 hours ago|||

FYI LLMs are great at generating the ascii art, so you can create real fun games and TUIs that look like old school BBSs.

fidotron 7 hours ago|||

We can remain grateful the kids haven't discovered how to use figlet in HN comments.

genxy 6 hours ago||

ENSHT comes for everyone. This is sexual selection over natural selection. Claude Code also gets this wrong, they got way to fancy and ruined what a good tui is by being an uncanny combo between a scrolling log and a completely rewritten canvas.

pillsburycat 3 hours ago||

This looks really cool. However, the current AI models are pretty good at designing UIs from prompts and even turning screenshots of mocks into full UIs. I'm not sure this visual design approach would save time vs simply prompting an AI agent.

That being said, I could see a niche market for a designer persona who is used to building in tools like figma.

ajspig1 3 hours ago|

also, this assumes humans are still the primary CLI consumers. With agents increasingly being the first-class users of command-line tools, building visual design tooling for terminal UIs feels like optimizing for a shrinking audience.

pillsburycat 3 hours ago||

Well you still need some human prompting the AI and looking at results, no? :)

Agents aren't picky with UI, so most effort will always be spent designing for humans, even if they are not the primary consumers.

pelcg 6 hours ago||

If you want inspiration on all kinds of TUIs on show and display Terminal Trove [1] is useful to get an idea for what other tools look like.

I find the search [2] also helpful.

[1] https://terminaltrove.com/

[2] https://terminaltrove.com/explore/

auvi 5 hours ago||

For exports, it is missing the ultimate: Borland Turbo Vision, the Rolls-Royce of TUI frameworks.

ifh-hn 5 hours ago||

Why are these things being built on web technologies? There's loads of "modern" terminals that use typescript etc. to me terminal means lower level.

Also wheres the Linux version? You've Mac, windows, and docker. When someone says terminal to me I default to Linux.

ctmnt 3 hours ago||

On one hand this is a neat idea. I've thought about how nice it would be to have a visual layout tool for text-based designs. The current offerings are slim. Of course, you could easily argue that if you need a visual tool for it, you've gone too far; even the most sophisticated TUIs are still extremely simple.

On the other hand, for this work as they describe, it needs to be a complete UI framework across a bunch of languages and built on top of a bunch of existing frameworks. That seems... ambitious. Building one UI framework for one language is plenty hard enough.

pcmoore 8 hours ago||

Watched the video. Why isn't the editor a TUI itself?

jappgar 8 hours ago||

Because a website is easier to use and more accessible.....

elxr 7 hours ago||

This one is not very accessible, try using tab + arrow keys to focus anything on the sidebar.

baranguneysel 8 hours ago||

Great question.

__alexs 7 hours ago||

The TUI hype seems like nostalgia for COBOL mainframe apps that most people have never even used. A sort of secondhand cyberpunk role play with zero focus on actual UX.

Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?

nobleach 4 hours ago||

Have you ever watched someone USE those COBOL TUIs? Everyone from airline ticket agents, to local governments, to folks at Home Depot while looking up inventory. They could fly through menus and accomplish things. I remember when Best Buy switched to a Windows-based experience. It was terrible. Simply adding a mouse+windowing experience slowed everything way down. I saw it first hand at Target too. They went from an OS/2-based TUI to Windows NT. I know there'll always be those folks that think we're all just trying to play "leet Haxorz", but there's just something about those systems that people deeply connected with.

elxr 4 hours ago|||

I personally think the opencode and kilo CLI have great UX, certainly better (and easier to use) than the web versions of both.

A lot of the recent TUI apps are really not old-school in any way. Not all apps need the feature-set of a browser engine. And compared to native mac/linux desktop apps, TUIs get cross-platform support by default.

> Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?

We all know the answer to this

PunchyHamster 5 hours ago||

TUIs are great coz they work seamlessly over shell, but there is no reason for that for editor.

tracker1 5 hours ago||

Half surprised there's no raratui export with the other options. That said, probably lends itself more to Ink and @opentui/react. Also slightly disappointed at the lack of a direct Linux build for AppImage and/or Flathub. Also not using Github's releases which is a little curious.

TrevorFSmith 6 hours ago|

This is a vibe coded app and isn't what I'd want but still, it's interesting to consider what a good implementation of "Figma for TUIs" could be, especially if it avoids the trap of simply treating the console as a crude raster instead of taking advantage of text and keyboards. IMO we don't need WIMP GUI shoved into terminal emulators.

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