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TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

tui.studio

121–130 of 304 posts

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#121
post #15

> 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".

tbf that's Apple's fault, not the choice of the free, unpaid open source developer.

You mean the AI agent that was prompted to vibe code this?

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#122
post #16

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 U…

The distinction is - if it runs over ssh (no x / graphics login) or on a headless machine - TUI If it requires graphics login, even if it uses character layouts - GUI IMHO the T/G is not for the display elements, it's for the type of session .

Not to put too fine a point on it, but X11 runs over ssh just fine. No "graphics login" required.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a TUI if it uses text to build those elements. No. All you've done is make a low-resolution GUI.

TUI means "Terminal User Interface" or "Text User Interface" A GUI that is built with Text, and intended to be used in a Terminal, is what a TUI is, colloquially AND definitionally. What do you think qualifies as a TUI?

I've been using TUIs since PR1MEOS mini-mainframes in the early 1980's, I know what I'm talking about.

The issue is not the text. It's the WIMP interface.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#126
post #8

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.

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.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#127

If you're going to put a video demo on your main webpage, can it have play/pause and a control bar? So I can actually skip to a part I want to look at. Here's the actual video: https://tui.studio/screenshots/video.mp4 . Also, how does this handle terminal resizing? Are there options to anchor elements to the left/right etc, or will narrowing the terminal window just make everything fall off the side, or worse, all th…

You can right click on it and choose "Show controls", at least in Firefox.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#129
post #16

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 U…

I like TUIs keyboard-centric. Mouse can be a plus, but it should never be necessary.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#130
post #98
post #56

The lack of accessibility of TUIs is not great in general. I'd much rather terminals emulator provide a webview directly, and maybe use https://webtui.ironclad.sh/ if you really want the look. I think it makes more sense for a cli to offer a mini webserver instead. Think `fish_config`, but opened in the terminal directly [0]. [0]: like https://iterm2.com/browser-plugin.html

> The lack of accessibility of TUIs is not great in general. Interesting. In what ways? I haven't heard anyone express this concern before.

Depending on how the TUI is made, it can be very visual, but lacks structure for a screen reader (unless you stay in the very simple "input field: value" kind of prompt, but even then auto completion is tricky).

Web browsers offer the DOM to tools such as screen readers (OSs offer their own accessibility sdks). Someday perhaps the TUI application could talk to the terminal emulator that would itself talk to the accessibility sdk of the OS and that info would somehow then be accessible.

There was a beginning of discussion at bubble tea[0] about this for example.

[0]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea/issues/780

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