WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

This is neat, but no, stop it. TUIs are an abomination of design that poorly mimic actually beautiful UIs. They look the way they do because of inherent constraints of the terminal, not because their authors particularly wanted them to look like that. So bringing that design language to a platform that does support rich UIs is artificially limiting what can be done on the web. It will also never truly have the same design as the terminal, unless you also want to avoid having any rich multimedia, interactivity, or use any web functionality introduced after 1995. At that point, your users would be better served by a text-only or Gemini site instead.

As an aside, I think TUIs are wrong in most cases. If you're building something like a text editor or process manager, sure, they have their place. Although even then I would argue that they shouldn't mimic the look and feel of GUIs, but be purpose-built for the app in question. But most terminal programs shouldn't use TUIs. They should accept command-line arguments to modify their behavior, run and do what the user asked, and then exit. This is how you make programs adaptable, composable, and scriptable. They can still be made interactive at runtime via a different e.g. "client" program, but forcing the user to manually interact with an interface that mimics GUIs is an awful experience.

Web model is objectively better than

‘’’ Stop thinking in standard CSS units like px, em, rem, % Start thinking in Character Cells for spacing, sizing, and positioning ‘’’

The higher-level view of data-over-time is inherently serial, and I don't think there's anything anyone can do about it: Serial is the correct/best abstraction.

That being said, I acknowledge the problem you're referring to, because serial what exactly? Every time we complete the circle, it gets a little smaller, and our collective knowledge of what is actually going on improves.

It should make a certain amount of sense if you look at it this way: Use a serial decoder to fill a memory bank of character cells or pixels or whatever, and share that memory bank with a video encoder, and the software guys say: well, how about I just fill up that memory bank directly. Then, you don't want character cells but triangles, and you find you're just DMA'ing in that shared buffer and working around the timing of another process reading it and your ring-based memory buffer has turned back into a serial protocol before you know it.

I think the main problem is that programming languages are terrible at serial, so programmers keep trying to work around it, and then convert to/from serial at the edges.

> it's another thing to claim that this is the peak tech to power our modern CLIs, or a solid foundation for portable UIs.

I can't explain all of it, but terminal UI remain without match: Even today (2025) I use a terminal because there's no better human-computer interface for doing intellectual work.

A picture of a terminal, is not a terminal, so I understand why stuff like this confuses.

Much faster to use on a keyboard than point clicking all over the place with a mouse on the screen or typing the long commands and flags and forgetting a single flag and having to typing it once again.