alt Hacker NewsThe next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now
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My favourite library from these folks is gum (https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum). The basic premise is simple - instead of using hardcoded variables or in addition/instead of using CLI flags, call gum and capture the STDOUT to get the selected input value(s). Great for turning a bash script into a TUI, uses these libraries under the hood.
I find the pattern of showing interactive TUI if required options/flags are omitted much nicer than showing an error/help output.
Somehow this whole ecosystem of tools always gives me a bad vibe, and I can't quite pinpoint why.
All the demos and videos are applications with lots of stacked pop-ups/modal windows, and things moving around continuously. It all reminds me of what we typically see in computers in TV shows or sci-fi films.
It just looks like a chaotic mess of things, and I get this really strong urge to just stay away from it all.
Please, a simple web page that tells me what this does, and why I should use it. Links to github have never done this for me.
I'm so excited about this! And I expect the speed/bandwidth improvements in the new renderer to be very significant.
I spent a while hacking on my own fork of the Bubbletea renderer over the last few months in order to run a game over SSH[1]. It was a ton of work for a niche, simple game (snake) but it dropped bandwidth usage by a factor of 10. The new renderer has to be more general so it might not quite hit that for all applications, but I bet it's not that far off.
I could also see it being an even more significant gain for apps that use a lot of modern colors and styling, since escape sequences there can be very long / heavy weight.
Some of the comments here are annoyed about the website branding but FWIW I think bubbletea and lipgloss (and wish, if you want SSH stuff) are really excellent tools for building "boring" TUIs too.
[1] https://eieio.games/blog/secure-massively-multiplayer-snake/
I love this design language to death. I know a lot of engineers prefer a no-frills, straight to the point readme (as reflected in these comments), and I get that. But I also don't want to live in a world made out of nothing but boxes.
It feels a bit like visiting Fallingwater and complaining that there are no arrows pointing to the bathroom.
Go's package management is just so absolutely easy to use, and this package uses it flawlessly.
The github url is https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea, so you can easily guess how to import it:
import "charm.land/bubbletea/v2"
Yup, start with "tea.Init()". Wait, where'd the "tea" come from? Silly, importing the above package url magically adds "tea" into the current file scope, it's obvious.
man I want to know where their creativity comes from, it's like they've built an entire world with a story... but it's just a (highly regarded) collection of packages
We sure are putting a lot of investment into 1970s-era user interfaces!
(That said, I do appreciate the artistic flair that went into their website.)
I just want a terminal that can also run fully graphical interfaces and that scroll as more lines are typed or a later command outputs text! Next level up from sixels or escape sequences.
I've been building a coding agent (https://github.com/abrinsmead/cogent) on the previous version of bubble tea for the past few weeks and it has been nice to work with (though honestly I'm not touching much code).
The biggest blocker I have is that I haven't been able to simultaneously support both mouse wheel scrolling and the ability to select text for copy and paste. I understand that this is a limitation of pretty much all terminals, but we have seen it solved in Claude Code. Maybe this new version has a solution.
As long as all these next-gen terminal features don't make implementing a terminal from scratch as hard as implementing a browser.
I like that terminals have less surface area that browsers
Maybe I’m getting old but I couldn’t tell if this was a joke or not. I think they should explain a little more like what these products actually do?
Surprised huh v2 isn't included in this and there's no mention of it in the release announcement at all. Quite a few of my apps mix bubbletea/bubbles and huh in different parts of the app, and while they're typically separate and technically could coexist no problem, it would feel a bit weird. Plus huh is advertised as "can be integrated into a Bubble Tea application"; I'm not using it personally but it's surely used by some users. Anyone from charmbracelet here could comment on the situation?
It's cute. My main complaint is I was expecting some real next-gen bubble tea.
> the terminal is the most powerful way to interface with the operating system.
There's something about the UX here, how we're interfacing in an abstract way directly with the computer, now with agents. I hope we can get some interesting design study insights over the coming months and years.
I don't see a UI replacing the experience we get with TUIs. Also, UIs seem very clunky, in relation to TUIs performance.
I don't understand what this is but I kinda want it. Is it kinda cool-retro-term + starship?
I don't know what I would build with these but I'll think of something because they're so awesome.
Stoked to see this! I’ve been using bubble tea and all its accoutrements on various little hobby projects for the past few years. Love the ergonomics and aesthetics and can’t wait to try out v2!
It took me too long to understand that this is just a TUI library for Go
Is this like the new Turbo Vision from Borland? That’s something I’d love to have!
No popcorn? This needs popcorn
It's crazy how much this UI design is like future retro 2008 design.
Branding aside, if I have to use -50% magnification to get to a readable text size, your text is far, far too large. Why is this website yelling at me
Why is it so hard to figure out what any of this does? I just want some screenshots
God I hate this industry
[dead]
“lipgloss”?
Shameless related plug for my recent project Trolley, which lets you package a TUI as a desktop app, for your non-technical users or otherwise:
Theory: terminal apps are closing the agent self-improvement loop because agents can use TUIs more easily than web/desktop/mobile.
Anomaly, which builds OpenCode + OpenTUI), is also doing some really interesting stuff in this space with their custom renderer. And then there's Ink (https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink) which is what Claude Code uses. I also built Ink Web (https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web) to make Ink work in the browser.
The virality of OpenClaw and Claude Code has me wondering if terminals could actually go mainstream (eg used by non-tech users). More thoughts here: https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-03-05-terminals-are-cool-ag...