Ask HN: What is your opinion on TUI applications

With the AI agents, comes the resurgence of TUIs, what is your opinion of them?

Design-wise I personally prefer the color, font and sizing consistency. I love the fact that keyboard is first class citizen and would prefer to use TUI to gtk/electron/windows-ui wherever possible.

4 points | by po1nt 8 hours ago

4 comments

  • laladrik 2 hours ago
    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.
  • lordkrandel 4 hours ago
    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.
  • 3stacks 8 hours ago
    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
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    • lordkrandel 4 hours ago
      uh, micasa.dev has a nice concept, I should investigate that. Thanks!
  • taosu_la 4 hours ago
    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)