I've seen lots of TUIs lately, why is that? What is the renewed interest?
The only places I know of is Awesome TUIs [0] and terminaltrove [1]
I can also see that Ratatui has an awesome list too [2].
[0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
The only places I know of is Awesome TUIs [0] and terminaltrove [1]
I can also see that Ratatui has an awesome list too [2].
[0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
We just don’t have good desktop GUI platforms anymore. Qt and GTK are massive beasts, Windows changes theirs every 4 years (and no one wants to be tied to a single platform anyway), we don’t want to deal with Electron, and writing your own GUI from scratch is hard.
Terminals just got good lately and it’s way easier to make something higher quality in them than as a GUI. It’s just too hard to make a good small desktop app.
It’s the same reason why it’s easier to make something look great with LEGO than if you want to mold clay. I’d also wager that devs today on average know more about good UX than devs did back in the 80s when clunky terminal apps used to be made.
Buttons are a good example. If you want to define a button theme, you have to individually define the theme for every possible state the button can be in. No inheritance, the best you can do is copy and paste them over (which means if you want to tweak one, you have to tweak them all). Compared to something like CSS, its a nightmare to theme even slightly interactive Godot GUI's
Another homegrown personal tool I had once written was in Go with DearImgui, so basically with AllenDang/giu... also really quite rapid dev and lean-enough binary / perf.
But Godot is wysiwyg for GUI stuff, so that's a plus..
[0] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples...
A few reasons:
- for the most part TUI apps are cross-platform: macOS, Linux, BSD, Windows
- they cut down on context switching. If you're already in the terminal, you shouldn't have to switch to a GUI app to check on something.
- Today's terminal emulators—Ghostty, WezTerm, Kitty, iTerm, Alacrity, etc.—are fast and capable with GPU acceleration, 24-bit color support running on high resolution displays. It makes for a compelling platform to code for.
- Anecdotally lots of developers are spending less time in IDEs and more time in the terminal using Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, etc.
For me, often, it’s an escape for a GUI world taken over by out-of-control “design” tenets. I value good Ux design concerns, but often working with designers lately feels bureaucratic, at times cargo culting, and overly spacious.
It’s like a graphical form of “I didn’t have time to give you a short answer, so I gave you a long one instead”. TUIs force a paucity that often makes for a nice information/pixels ratio.
When Rust came along and presented a career opportunity, terminal apps was a great way to get into it and filled a gap in a lot of people's skill sets. Even when building GUI apps in Rust, your first entry point is a CLI usually.
We took our UX thinking from web & mobile and remixed it with Rust and new ideas came out. Turns out "If it aint broke don't fix it" for two decades can build up a lot of evolutionary pressure.
I believe this might be current most popular application using this library.
I'm surprised it isn't included in this showcase
I used codex to write the VHS script, which runs codex to generate a Ratatui app, and then then used codex to add this to the website. It's codapodes all the way down.
This means almost all TUI programs can be entirely keyboard driven.
Almost all GUI programs fail at this, in other words, it's extremely likely that at some point, something that requires a mouse action will interrupt.
I for one love the tranquility of a dark mode terminal and find it quite pleasant with a nice nerd font, a pretty color scheme, a single high resolution monitor and an ergonomic keyboard. I feel much more connected to the code or data I’m interacting with in that space. Trying to live there as much as I can lately. JiraTui has been great for preventing context switching at work.