TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool • Hacker News Board

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#221

Post by jandrese » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #80

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a TUI if it uses text to build those elements. You can be effective and powerful in any kind of interface, Just like you can be ineffective and weak in any kind of interface. People like TUIs because they're cool, and work over SSH.

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

Would you say old DOS applications like Borland's Turbo series of compilers were not TUIs? They ran in the console but had menus, mouse support, dialog boxes, etc...

How about those text games that used ASCII art and you typed in commands like "look" and "go north"?

I would say using text mode is the primary requirement for a TUI. The other requirement being some kind of human-machine connection, IE a User Interface.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#222

Post by Felixbot » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:53 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#223

Post by quotemstr » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

gattilorenz wrote: post #9

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

Yes!

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#224

Post by elxr » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

__alexs wrote: post #40

The TUI hype seems like nostalgia for COBOL mainframe apps that most people have never even used. A sort of secondhand cyberpunk role play with zero focus on actual UX. Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?

I personally think the opencode and kilo CLI have great UX, certainly better (and easier to use) than the web versions of both.

A lot of the recent TUI apps are really not old-school in any way. Not all apps need the feature-set of a browser engine. And compared to native mac/linux desktop apps, TUIs get cross-platform support by default.

> Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?

We all know the answer to this

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#225

Post by bonoboTP » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

mpalmer wrote: post #220

bonoboTP wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better get ready for almost all software to use AI assistance in its creation. You can build great things using AI agents, and you can build trash. Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.

Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners. Opinions do not win by "high score". Asserting the validity of opinions based on how widely they are held is dumb. If 30% of devs love openclaw, I'm not re-examining my informed opinion, I am forming a new one about that 30% cohort.

That was a reaction to "Not sure why this gets voted to the frontpage.", not to any correctness claims.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#226

Post by gaigalas » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

Seems nice.

I launched https://github.com/alganet/tuish yesterday (pure shell backend).

Exporting to pure shell could be a killer feature, especially for smaller and ad-hoc apps (no dependencies, no compilation, etc).

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#227

Post by hrmtst93837 » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

tim-projects wrote: post #7

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.

[flagged]

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#228

Post by dormento » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

gattilorenz wrote: post #9

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

Old VB is still king for laying out interfaces, for the narrowest of use cases today, bu still... Makes me sad how much we regressed due to the web.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#229

Post by duped » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #20

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.

This is why I don't like TUIs at all, they're really bad at displaying complex information, handling complex interactions, and discovering how to compose those together.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#230

Post by ram90 » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

eterps wrote: 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…

This is exactly the kind of passive aggressive attitude that is tolerated on HN that makes this place unbearable.

"This is dumb" - gets downvoted to oblivion. "This is nonsensical + a bunch of absolutely bs reasoning" - second most upvoted comment atm.

HN tolerates the appearance of quality discourse over the actual thing, and dealing with this dissonance in most comment sections is exhausting.