Why TUIs are back

I think TUI's are popular because they're easier to make than a GUI. They are much more constrained. A TUI is basically a wire frame with some colours, whereas with a GUI the wireframe is only the first step.

My terminal has not been ensh*ttified. I used the Internet for work, for knowledge, more than I use it for entertainment. One of the reasons I like TUIs.

The tide is going to turn on this in the second half of 2026. There have always been nerds who just love TUIs, and still read their email in Mutt. But I think the subtext of this article is right, that TUIs are back because of how much of a pain UI development is.

But that's changed drastically in the last few months. I spent the weekend doing SwiftUI stuff with Claude, with a lot of success. It's going to get much easier to ship fast, solid, native UIs for things, and native UI is both very fun to build and also attractive to ordinary users.

(Fun green field for doing interesting UI work: do native UI for remote server stuff, like an htop UI that uses some dialect of SSH to fetch remote data.)

I think modern TUIs are a blip. A big, important blip. But a blip. The age of the Orc is over. The time of the Human Interface Guideline has come.

Luke Smith was too early on this.

A reverse shibboleth for someone who does zero professional design work is taking a screenshot of differing corner radii in macOS.

Don’t fall for this.

I kind of wish we had HTML but for GUI. Imagine if you had a "gui" flag in terminfo and you could send an escape sequence on stdout after which you could send out screen updates as a stripped down form of HTML on stdout and receive events on stdin. I mean something that can describe the simplest bog standard Windows 95 application with a menu bar, side bar, dialogs, buttons, and proportional text. Otherwise we could offer a GUI for applications over SSH by having the terminal open a local TCP socket connected to stdin/out and launch the user's browser, implementing the most barebones CGI.

VB6 was the peak of desktop GUI app development change my mind

Only for software engineers who are already familiar with terminals. Most non tech people I know and in my company absolutely hate TUI. Even a fraction of software developers who spend most their time outside terminals (especially those that are on Windows and/or use specialized tools/IDEs) prefer to avoid TUIs as well.

I'm not surprised at all, if I was to choose from TUI or browser-gui (electron, react, react-native, anything similar) i'd always choose TUI. Good gui design died a long ago. Almost every gui designer needs us to always look at some nonsense animations that serve zero purpose and just make you needlessly wait. There is no such thing as "essential" animation in GUI. And no, plain simple progress bar does not count as animation, but rotating "progress circle" does. GUIs got so unbelievably bloated, it used to be an advantage to have more pixels, as you could pack more information in useful way. Today? Nah. Look at signal (or signal-desktop), it's not even funny anymore. Dolphin used to be good file explorer. Today it's borderline usable, animated so much so that i have to maintain own patched version. One just cannot hide from this, mostly because devs do not understand (or want to acknowledge) need for this stuff to be configurable (instead they more likely focus on stuff no one actually needs. again looking at you, signal.). Or stuff like libadwaita that is likely one of the most arrogant take on gui library ever.

I think most people are missing the forest for the trees.

TUIs are popular because once you use a piece of software that doesn't have a poorly-written GUI library full of animations bogging it down, you don't want to go back.

It's hard to make a TUI that isn't snappy, no matter how much useless eye-candy it has.

The bottom of the post contains an interesting suggestion, for us software developers to read one of three 'basics' books on UI: "Nielsen, Norman or Johnson".

Can someone who is more knowledgeable about these help compare and contrast these three texts a bit?

Because now we have a young generation nostalgic of their parents experience in the 1980-90's, and that includes the TUI experiences we were stuck with back in the day.

They are back because modern languages (Rust, Go) have made it pretty straight forward to build them. Ratatui and such allow you to write a TUI really quickly without needing to deal with VT100 arcana.

Because LLMs operate on text, and their purveyors claim natural language interfaces are the best thing since sliced bread, since that's what they sell.

Nothing inherently special or even superior about TUIs, I think this very simply just speaks to "what happened" which is the fragmentation of the GUI space over the course of Microsoft v Apple v Linux v "The Web."

Seems like it could have gone differently. Feels like the time could be ripe for something like a "declarative gui spec."

I've got a bit of a different on it... It's because TUIs do lend themselves better to automation (it's been mentioned in the thread) and, most importantly, it's because there's less cognitive dissonance between a TUI and how it typically operates and... The way AIs are using command line tools / the terminal (or a REPL, for those using agents hooked to a REPL).

In a way AI agents are validating what us old-timers always knew: the CLI and TUIs is the most powerful way. And AI tools didn't choose the most common dev environment: devs using fat IDEs (and btw I was already using IntelliJ IDEA back when some people were still arguing NetBeans was better than IntelliJ) are way more common than those piping Unix commands to achieve even simple tasks. Instead AI tools did choose the most powerful way to work: and that's piping terminal commands and SSH/tmux/TUIs.

When the tool itself, like Claude Code CLI, is immediately showing the outputs of piped Unix commands and allowing to run commands from a prompt and is, itself, a TUI, it's validating that it's an extremely powerful way to work.

A Claude Code CLI (or similar) TUI in a tmux session is something quite powerful.

Then you combine that with the fact that techs like LSP and tree-sitter did at least partially commodotize the IDE and suddenly TUIs (or things very close to it, like GUI Emacs: which can do graphics but is still mostly used as a TUI tool) do look very appealing.

Magit is considered by many --even non Emacs user-- as the best Git interface ever. It's text, text and more text.

My life is terminals (text), Git and Magit (text), Emacs (GUI but basically text), SSH (text), tmux (text), many text things I forgot and now TUI harnesses.

If you're modelizing in Blender or editing movies or creating movies, a GUI makes sense. But if you write code, which is text, all you need is text, text and more text.

TUIs are making a comeback because it is all text and AI agents are proof of that.

They were never really gone, just maybe introduced to a new audience a little more lately which is great.

There's something disgusting about the use of characters for graphs/charts on a bitmapped monitor. Trust nerds to find a way to make stuff ugly!

Next one is the NoJS movement and Gemini or even Gopher spaces.

JS literally destroyed the software landscape. All the bad practices advertised as best.

One huge advantage that the commandline + TUIs have is ... speed.

I get more things done, in most cases, than via a GUI. In a way a TUI is a GUI of course, but with the focus on keyboard use and inputting instructions/commands. Most GUIs seem to be centered around keyboard AND mouse and then try to make things convenient here for those operations, such as drag-and-drop via the mouse.

The best thing about TUIs is that they're so fast. They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast. There's a learning curve for the bazillion hotkeys, because all it is is hot keys, but when you have it, you just fly.

I've been reverting more and more: mutt (mail), newsboat (RSS), amfora (gemini protocol), gurk (Signal), chawan (web), and even trn (Usenet). My RAM usage is tiny. Everything is quick.

GUIs should take a page from the TUI playbook and consider making the app keyboard-first. Nothing is more frustrating than a missing hotkey.

Hate to be this guy but it’s Xerox PARC, not Park.

TL;DR, not from the article: Because Claude Code was a small team experiment done months after Claude Sonnet 3.7 had support for file editing; a bunch of companies had to fast follow; and the path of least resistance / collaborative work between PM and dev and design is copying, and companies are companies, they prefer money and competition over patiently waiting for X00 people to decide on a vision and deliver it.

I think it's important to note this because it's not great. Either I'm having a fever dream, or, someone will GUI this stuff and it'll be a gamechanger.

> TUIs are Back

Citation needed?

ahh the classic - see one anecdote - then create a narrative that the world is changing.

if TUIs were truly back - as DHH would like you to believe - his money maker - Basecamp - would be available as a TUI, Salesforce, Workday, Bloomberg etc would be available as TUIs. Though Bloomberg is the closest to a TUI.

but let's continue to delude ourselves.

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TUIs are terrible UX. - Please select this text with your mouse. Are you scrolling where are you it’s all like legos.

Bad UX has been normalised so far that people write whole articles set in this anti-world, “why TUIs are back”..

The whole situation is like if we invented flying cars, but to get to the parking, we must ride horses because regular cars are not good enough now that we have flying ones, and horses are cheaper and you can ride them without a licence.

Developers often say that TUIs are better. But this is largely a matter of taste. To be honest, outside the programmer class, how many groups of users actually like TUIs? Very few. Linux is lighter, and these days even gaming through tools like Wine/Proton has improved a lot. So why do Windows and GUI-based systems still sell more and get used more widely? Because most people prefer wrapped UIs. They prefer interfaces that visually package the system for them. Electron has real problems: memory usage, deployment bloat, and ecosystem fragmentation. But if you move too far toward TUI-first tools, your market target becomes much smaller. So the real question is: why are TUIs coming back in the AI ecosystem? My answer is: AI FOMO. Seriously, why are AI-integrated IDEs like Cursor and Antigravity becoming popular? Even when AI chat is built into the IDE, the IDE often freezes or slows down. If you just open a terminal, it is much faster. So yes, TUIs are attractive in AI workflows because they are fast, direct, remote-friendly, and easy to automate. But explaining their return only as a failure of GUI is too technical a view. There is also a social and market reason: people want access to AI workflows as quickly as possible, even if the interface is not what ordinary users would normally prefer.