TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

mipselaer 577 points 276 comments March 13, 2026
tui.studio · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

mipselaer

Amazing cool design tool for TUI's I got it running instantly and it feels stable and complete as well. Only 10 stars in GitHub.

grilo16

Noice figma for terminals! Dude super cool idea, great job =D

kantord

this looks insanely cool. One of the most original ideas I have seen on HackerNews in the past few years.

kantord

tip: your git repo's description (not readme, repo description) does not link the website. It should.

aethorn

The website UI is unreal, I loved the idea

tim-projects

This is so cool I immediately wanted to convert my apps. But then when I thought about it, well it's trying to recreate CSS but in a majorly worse way. Browsers are ubiquitous and I can just tell ai to build a web page. I can't really see a use case other than novelty.

fidotron

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.

gattilorenz

Look up Visual Basic for Dos for a surprisingly good TUI editor!

lsaferite

I find it slightly annoying and disappointing that the blocks saying what frameworks it's designed to export to aren't links to those frameworks.

glhaynes

> 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".

eterps

This is nonsensical, there is nothing textual about the UIs being shown here. It doesn't stop being a GUI if you have a 1:1 representation of the concept within character cells. The UX actually matters, and TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power (lazygit being an excellent example). But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.

pcmoore

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

vidarh

I really don't want my TUI's to look like GUI's rendered in low res. The appeal to me of a TUI is that it is built specifically to be a TUI, and that means eschewing complexity and detail , and favouring compact text.

worthless-trash

The corners of the boxes appear in the wrong place in the cell. I don't think there is utf8 characters that allow for drawing on the outside of the cell, (happy to be wrong) ┌ (U+250C), ┐ (U+2510), └ (U+2514), ┘ (U+2518) <-- these 4 draw in the middle of the cell. 「 (U+FF62), ⌟, (U+231F), <-- these are two that cover part of the outside, but not the other corners. 「┐└」 Can anyone tells me how to get those 'corner of cell' characters, including uprights and horizontals ?

trollbridge

I don’t want to be a curmudgeon, but why not just use CSS, HTML, React, etc. at this point? You could choose a style that looks like a TUI.

lagrange77

The background ASCII animation is so cool! Is it an actual simulation?

jbstack

Interesting idea, but: > Design once, generate production-ready code for your framework of choice. Switch targets without touching your design. Alpha notice: Code export is not functional yet. We're actively working on it — check back soon. In other words, it isn't at all usable right now. You can't produce a TUI with it, not even a limited one.

varjag

Turbo Vision strikes back

raincole

When your TUI is so complex that you need a GUI to design it, perhaps you shouldn't use TUI in the first place.

jappgar

Why did they make a website?

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