alt Hacker NewsI think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code, everything else is background noise compared to it.
What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required.
It's a major reason why I enjoy hacking on https://pico.sh -- deploying the TUI requires zero user involvement.
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I'm still motivated to adopt a TUI application in lieu of a pure CLI or GUI because of the ability to use it over SSH.
That's why I started creating TUI apps. The cli was increasingly becoming a main view for daily work. I was using shortcuts to put the terminal side by side with other desktop apps or browser windows for context, but it was nicer to just write something that could sit in a tmux or zellij session next to claude or opencode.
It's also nice to have a little less to worry about as a desktop application developer, to be honest. The display is less nice (low text density especially) in exchange.
Claude code amplified the trend hundred fold but there was already a significant increase of TUI since the days of go fzf, rust ratatui and python rich.
My bet would be a desire to do away with heavy browser based UI and the curiosity of trying to test the limits of terminal based rendering.
The TUI version of ClaudeCode is not even that good compared even to the VSCode plugin.
I don't think that's true, because it appears to me that the upswing in new TUI programs predates Claude Code's takeoff.