Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS

Only tangentially related, but: what is the appeal of TUI's? I don't really understand.

The advantages of CLI's are (IMO) that they compose well and can be used in scripts. With TUI's, it seems that you just get a very low fidelity version of a browser UI?

I couldn't get this to run successfully.

More broadly, I have concerns about introducing a middleware layer over AWS infrastructure. A misinterpreted command or bug could lead to serious consequences. The risk feels different from something like k9s, since AWS resources frequently include stateful databases, production workloads, and infrastructure that's far more difficult to restore.

I appreciate the effort that went into this project and can see the appeal of a better CLI experience. But personally, I'd be hesitant to use this even for read-only operations. The direct AWS cli/console at least eliminates a potential failure point.

Curious if others have thoughts on the risk/benefit tradeoff here.

Should have a Price Of Current Changes menu bar item! So you can see if your changes cost $.01 or $10,001.

Somehow every 15 line shell script I write now turns into a 50kloc bun cli or tui app. Apparently there are many such cases.

Embarrassingly dumb question: if you’re one of the few users who don’t run a dark background terminal … how well do these TUI render (in a light background)?

Looks great! If you have multiple AWS accounts in your org, you probably want to use something like aws-sso-util to populate your profiles so you can quickly swap between them

I thought the title meant the AWS UI was “terminal”, which I would be on board with

> // TODO: Handle credential_source, role_arn, source_profile, sso_*, etc.

So it does not support any meaningful multi-account login (SSO, org role assumption, etc), and requires AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID/AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY. That's a no-no from security POV for anything in production, so not sure what's the meaningful way to use that.

Is there a Rust port or binding for ncurses?

Crashes on first use. Not a good way to go viral.

I wish more TUI designers would spend some time playing with Hercules and experiencing the old "mainframe" way of arranging interfaces. Those guys really knew what they were doing.

Nice! A while back I had started something similar for Azure but it never really got traction (or nearly as polished as this!). It's a rough proof of concept but maybe it'll be useful to Azure users:

https://github.com/brendank310/aztui

Interesting, looks like k9s... but for AWS

Looks very nice! Need to test if it supports AWS_ENDPOINT_URL so it works with LocalStack.

I run a neocloud and our entire UX is TUI-based, somewhat like this but obviously simpler. The customer feedback has been extremely positive, and it's great to see projects like this.

ssh admin.hotaisle.app

How much of this was made with LLM?

Please don't use or suggest using homebrew as a Linux installation solution. It's better to simply point at the binaries directly.

yea let me just give access to my company AWS account credentials to this program made by some random dude on the internet

Great TUI app. Kudos & Ellerinize saglik

looks good. definitely will try

wow, that looks like k9s for aws. That's awesome

Nice idea but I won't trust a tool that first the commit is 11 hours ago.

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This is a good idea and I also built something like this. I don’t really like the implementation but there’s 2 important features you are missing:

- AWS APIs will often require workflows of api calls rather than simple CRUD ops if you wanna do just CRUD ops you can use cloudcontrol and just make a UI.

- AWS APIs are often n+1 so you need to enrich the list APIs or else it’s not super useful.

- I didn’t see any depagination logic, you often have to balance search/filtering with depagination time of AWS APIs and then for a proper UX you need to enrich the list items with Describe calls. (See n+1 above). When you implement the depagination logic you can reference the botocore implementation which is used by the aws cli depagination logic, there’s some quirks in naming and behavior that you can have fun looking at /s. (Both are open source so ChatGPT and Claude should know about it)

At the implementation level I really think you should just pull in the credential provider from the rust sdk so you can get AWS SSO support.

Otherwise nice weekend project.

Yet another project post that has all the hallmarks of LLM slop, how exciting for everyone to have their time wasted.

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great work.

excellent

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Nice, I was looking for this type of project 2 weeks ago. As a K9s user I wanted a similar experience to manage AWS resources.

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This guy stole this idea and basically the whole code base from another developer and ran it through an LLM to recreate it.

claude code can do this, natively without a custom implementation