Turbo Vision and Clipper want their glory MS-DOS days back.

TUIs built today should be usable by AI agents. I'm not sure exactly what it looks like but I'm imagining that every UI view has an associated CLI command that can yield precisely that view. Maybe like formally structured breadcrumbs, or maybe like Emacs "keyboard macros".

The biggest pain point with TUIs has always been the design iteration loop. You're basically writing code blind, running it, tweaking numbers, running again. It's like writing CSS without a browser preview.

Something like this could genuinely help for the layout/positioning phase, even if you still hand-write the interaction logic. The debate about whether these are "real TUIs" kind of misses the point imo. Textual and Ratatui already blur that line with mouse support and rich widgets. The ship sailed on pure keyboard-only text interfaces a while ago.

What I'd actually want from a tool like this is to export to multiple TUI frameworks. Right now you're locked into one ecosystem and the code export isn't even working yet, which makes the whole thing feel premature.

Somewhat related: Tachikoma.jl can do windows inside a terminal UI. https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-tachikoma-jl-a-termina...

Have been spending so much time in the terminal lately for the first time in my life (non-developer here) that made this for fun to spruce it up: https://github.com/dvelton/terminal-profile-studio

> No install fuss — download and start designing immediately.

also

> Gatekeeper blocks the app immediately. You'll see either "TUIStudio cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer" or "TUIStudio is damaged and can't be opened" on newer macOS after quarantine flags the binary. To get past it: right-click the .app → Open → Open anyway — or go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway".

I'm not sure the utility of this kind of stuff anymore. It's relatively easy to sketch a layout on a napkin + prompt and then prompt claude code to use python textual as as TUI layer. I've had pretty good success with Textual+Claude so have a few colleagues. You could probably use Figma + claude etc as well.

This is amazing! Just think how incredible this would have been to have in the 80's and 90's in some similar format.

I built something like this in 1993, it was used to design layouts for DOS apps and headers for printed listings. Imitating the BorlandPascal and Novel TUIs of the day

For {root} sake I'm a designer. Mostly all the code has been written by Claude and ad latere.