Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a TUI is easy now

hatchet.run

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 262 posts

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#141

Post by aspenmayer »

qingcharles wrote: post #47

Gemini built a nice TUI for me for a DHT scraper project I was coding: https://imgur.com/a/u3KHbDT It was like two-shot, cos the first version had some issues with CJK chars. I was impressed as it would have taken me a bunch of screwing around on lining up all the data etc when I wanted to concentrate on the scraping algorithm, not the pretty bits.

I’d be interested to hear more about your project. I’ve heard about other DHT related things like search engines and such using it, but I haven’t explored the space much myself.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#142

Post by neomantra »

Building a TUI was easy before, especially with the great toolsets for their respective languages BubbleTea / Textualize / Ratatui. And thanks to those frameworks, LLMs can manifest useful tools.

Similar to WebApps, it's only since the November'25 renaissance that I felt I could use them to create TUIs. Once I had that revelation, I started going into my backlog and using it.

I maintain a TUI Charting library, NTCharts. In January, I fixed a bug - totally obvious once identified - that I personally failed to find earlier. But the test harness, prompting, and Gemini got it done [1]. Gemini's spatial understanding was critical in completing the task.

I've been vibe-crafting a local LLM conversation viewing tool called thinkt. After scraping ~/.claude and making a data model, this is the point in PROMPTS.md where I start creating the TUI using BubbleTea. [2].

[1] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/issues/7#issuecomm...

[2] https://github.com/wethinkt/go-thinkt/blob/main/PROMPTS.md#2...

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#143

Post by willm »

fragmede wrote: post #61
willm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible. Terminals have supported mouse interactions for a long time.

possible isn't the same as supported and working. A non-terminal hunt-and-peck typer sits down and is presented with a terminal, what's the second that happens when they're typing? they make a mistake and try to click on the word they misspelled, and it doesn't work.

What TUIs are you referring to? Mouse is supported and working on just about every TUI framework.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#144

Post by dwb »

chrysoprace wrote: post #84
dwb wrote: post #48

I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s…

Here's why I use them: many modern graphical applications are extremely wasteful. TUIs are typically small, low footprint applications that don't come bundled with a browser or webview. I don't need yet another electron app for every little thing.

I’m definitely not advocating more little electron apps, and I’m totally with you on TUI’s benefits. I’m bemoaning the lack of imagination that has ended us up here and not in a situation where we can have, say, a small, low-footprint application that can deliver a more structured UI with minimal dependencies. It’s not an impossibility, it’s not even that difficult to imagine, we just don’t have the exact technology.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#145

Post by 9dev »

coldtea wrote: post #100
utilize1808 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim? In many ways, GUI was developed as the natural evolution of TUI. X server, with its client-server architecture, is meant to allow you to interact with remote sessions via "casted" GUI rather than a terminal. Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason. TUI just got the nosta…

> How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim? How many people eat microwave meals? How many eat gourmet Michelin star dishes? I don't care "how many use VSCode". My argument Emacs/Vim have great, well loved TUIs. And they are used by a huge number of the most respected coders in the industry. Whether a million React jockeys use VSCode doesn't negate this. > Countless engineers s…

The analogy mostly makes a point for snobbishness, but otherwise doesn’t really work. Most people would rather eat meals prepped by a Michelin star cook, but they can only afford microwave meals - whereas EMacs/Vim and VSCode are equally accessible to anyone.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#146

Post by dwb »

coldtea wrote: post #93
dwb wrote: post #48

I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s…

> I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Case in point from Emacs/Vim and the Borland IDEs to Claude, plus all kinds of handy utils from mc and htop to mutt. > They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web…

Funnily, Emacs is getting closer to what I’m after (it’s my main editor).

> That's not necessarily bad. Not everything has to be open ended.

I think it is necessarily bad and everything should be open ended. Bad in the sense of low quality, but if we’re talking about critical accessibility (someone is unable to use your application at all), morally bad too.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#147

Post by pjmlp »

Building TUIs was already super easy in 1990 with Turbo Vision and Clipper on MS-DOS, with compiled languages (TP, xBase), using super fast build times on systems running at 10 Mhz, within 640 KB.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#148

Post by dwb »

consp wrote: post #135
dwb wrote: post #48

I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s…

> You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different So ... Like all Apple products?

Not even close. Apple UIs - despite recent graphical howlers - have excellent accessibility APIs and are regularly praised by people that track such things. I’ve recently been building a macOS app and the UI testing is also based off it. There are apps that allow full keyboard navigation using it. I do agree that the window management side is much less customisable, though, and that does frustrate me.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#149

Post by shevy-java »

> Notably this was the first time I felt that using Claude Code for something non-arbitrary was significantly faster than doing it myself

Well, it is like code completion on a higher level.

I still don't like this approach. Besides, who is going to maintain that code? Such code will probably forever be required to be maitnained via Claude. So no humans involved. Just autogenerated stuff. I dislike this idea a lot.

Humans are slower, ok, but they built excellent software before Claude. What is coming next? Claude Linux-like Kernel? Top500 supercomputers will run it?

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#150

Post by 9dev »

jazzyb wrote: post #101
utilize1808 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim? In many ways, GUI was developed as the natural evolution of TUI. X server, with its client-server architecture, is meant to allow you to interact with remote sessions via "casted" GUI rather than a terminal. Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason. TUI just got the nosta…

> How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim? Perhaps I'm in some sort of "TUI bubble", but I'd bet good money that Emacs/Vim users outnumber VSCode users by an order of magnitude. But maybe I'm just surrounded by *nix devs.

No need to guess, the SO survey is probably still representative of the state of development environments:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-dev-id-es

Note that respondents may use multiple tools, but around 76% answered VSCode, whereas 24% answered Vim.

So, I’d wager you’re indeed in a *nix bubble.

Post reply on HN