Creating high-quality native desktop apps became a forgotten art, so people/shops are flocking to TUIs even for the local (i.e. not remote shells) work.
Sometime back I have played with Textual TUI framework very neat and good. I also feel implementing a good ui rich feature in TUI is very challenging and not great. Having said that,
I personally started liking command line tools Claude Code cli, codex. I feel they keep me focused, than the editors ai copilot window, like in visual studio code or cursor. I also see opencode UI is neat, but not really felt comfortable using it, may be I have to spend time and get used to it.
Love TUI apps, hate that there isn't a clean way to control native scrollback. It leaves you stuck between manually managing it via awkward hacks on the current visible screen, or not using it at all. I've been working on an LLM harness TUI for a little while, and this specific part has been the most frustrating (in conjunction with tmux).
They rock. I've made a couple which act as proxies for previously web-only activities. e.g. a Github Issue manager app which generates a little kanban board for me locally. The barrier for entry feels much lower and doesn't have the same "spinning up a new next.js app" fatigue. And I echo your thoughts with design consistency, having it just inherit your terminal theme makes for a nice visual experience. My favourite in this new wave of tui apps is micasa.dev
I'm surprised that Vim is not on the first place here. Great TUI application. However, the about the TUI applications which I use is extensibility. For example, FZF is just a picker, but it has a ton of extensions. Another TUI I like is the interactive mode of Khal (calendar). However, apart from TUI it allows to be used through CLI which allows you to make your scripts on top of it.
I was a fan, until I found in developing them, the same friction of a frontend developer.
All of a sudden, I realized that the command line is already the TUI I want.
Commands can be piped, while graphic interaction cannot.
Now I rely on standard input and standard output, and `fzf` for all the rest.
Creating high-quality native desktop apps became a forgotten art, so people/shops are flocking to TUIs even for the local (i.e. not remote shells) work.
Sometime back I have played with Textual TUI framework very neat and good. I also feel implementing a good ui rich feature in TUI is very challenging and not great. Having said that, I personally started liking command line tools Claude Code cli, codex. I feel they keep me focused, than the editors ai copilot window, like in visual studio code or cursor. I also see opencode UI is neat, but not really felt comfortable using it, may be I have to spend time and get used to it.
Love TUI apps, hate that there isn't a clean way to control native scrollback. It leaves you stuck between manually managing it via awkward hacks on the current visible screen, or not using it at all. I've been working on an LLM harness TUI for a little while, and this specific part has been the most frustrating (in conjunction with tmux).
They rock. I've made a couple which act as proxies for previously web-only activities. e.g. a Github Issue manager app which generates a little kanban board for me locally. The barrier for entry feels much lower and doesn't have the same "spinning up a new next.js app" fatigue. And I echo your thoughts with design consistency, having it just inherit your terminal theme makes for a nice visual experience. My favourite in this new wave of tui apps is micasa.dev
uh, micasa.dev has a nice concept, I should investigate that. Thanks!
No problemo! I built almost the same app just with a web interface because I couldn't sell my tech illiterate fiancé on a TUI app. I'd have used micasa if I was rolling solo
I'm surprised that Vim is not on the first place here. Great TUI application. However, the about the TUI applications which I use is extensibility. For example, FZF is just a picker, but it has a ton of extensions. Another TUI I like is the interactive mode of Khal (calendar). However, apart from TUI it allows to be used through CLI which allows you to make your scripts on top of it.
I was a fan, until I found in developing them, the same friction of a frontend developer. All of a sudden, I realized that the command line is already the TUI I want. Commands can be piped, while graphic interaction cannot. Now I rely on standard input and standard output, and `fzf` for all the rest.
I agree. That's why I don't use `mc` I find `cp *.pdf ~/Documents` much more egonomic
i love k9s, it iss the best tui I've seen before the AI era(there are too many TUIs in the AI era, I can't keep up with them)