Why TUIs are back

schmorptron

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

abhinavsharma

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

slopinthebag

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.

debarshri

It was always there. k9s for instance, it started getting noticed recently. With coding agents, it is even easier to build.

droidjj

> 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.

paddy_m

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.

lispisok

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.

herrherrmann

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!

nickjj

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.

shevy-java

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.

beej71

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.

refulgentis

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.

gorjusborg

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.

ohnei

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.

fithisux

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.

bellowsgulch

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.

fg137

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.

tptacek

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.

giancarlostoro

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.

cassepipe

> 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.