I think part of it is also that we're able to still LARP as full developers of complex systems while vibe coding by seeing an interface that makes us look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times
Bad UI plagued software development since ages immortal. The reason is not AI. Good UI design is a skill (or art?) and not an afterthought. But most people do not see it that way and that is why things are the way they are.
I think you have something there. I also think there’s a certain element of reacting against absolutely everything becoming a bloated electron app.
I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.
Considering the insane memory consumption of claude code running in my terminal, electron was never really the problem, bad software was the culprit all along.
I mean, I guess there's that novelty for the first few years of your career. I've been doing this a decade. I don't care about looking and feeling like a l33t h4xx0r and I doubt my peers do either.
TUIs just solve the right problems in the same world we're already working in - the terminal.
I’m relatively certain it’s just this at the end of the day. Everything I see people doing in their custom built TUIs or claude/codex CLI can be done, likely even easier, in a simplified IDE or easier to scan UI, but it feels nice/cool/cyberpunk/work-like to look like you’re doing more.
It is much easier to quickly generate a usable tui for simple monitoring and management than a usable gui. Go + lipgloss + bubble tea and a single prompt will give you whatever you need in a minute or two - much faster to compile and no platform specific issues. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window
> I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window
I do a lot of work in the terminal and that's exactly why I'd rather have other windows to the side so that my terminal can stay exactly focused on what I'm doing there. Those other windows might also be terminals, but I have a big screen, and I want to make use of it to see things all at once. A GUI gives far more flexibility for arranging those multiple views.
I've sat with coworkers taking two to twelve keystrokes to flip between things that I just have side by side in separate IDE windows, browser windows, or tabs... or can switch between with a single click instead of those keystrokes.
No it can never be the same. The terminal is about not having to switch from the keyboard. My entire workflow is tmux panes with different TUIs and terminals. Not to mention performance, with a neovim IDE you may have tens of them open in different panes for example. I wouldn't try that with VSCode.
TUIs already increased in popularity before agents became a thing. The low latency, the ease of remoting and the limited screen real estate which forces the developer to carefully design the interface are genuine advantages. I've been using mutt, vim, tig, tmux, newsboat, etc for over a decade at this point, and the cyberpunk feeling faded quickly.
I don't know I probably went for tui/cli for all my own tooling because it's just easier to develop in the past. Even when vibing not having a gui saves mental overhead for me. Vibe coding made computing a lot more personal for me and I like not using my mouse all the time.
Contrary to what the article says ("but Google gave up on the project before a real product was launched"), I think Flutter work continues and adoption is increasing
> The hardcore, moved to vim or emacs, trading immediate feedback and higher usability for the steepest learning curve I’ve seen
The only hard part about vim is to be forced to strecth the finger up to Escape for what is essentially the most essential functin in modal editor: Going back to command mode. The ideal workflow is do a quick edit and go back to command ("normal") mode instantly. The fact that it's Escape is a historical artifact that needs not be.
So just remap CapsLock to escape, it system-wide, it's not that hard and it's nice to have Escape there generally. In Linux and MacOS it's just a gui setting away and in windows you just have to edit (create?) a registry key. Can be done on any machine under a minute.
Apart from that I don't see where the learning curve is since you can just start with the basics from vim-tutor and learn more when you feel you're spending time on something. I already felt faster than in any other editor when I just knew the basics. The real problem of vim is that you get used to modal editing very quickly and it feels like the stone age when you don't have it.
Unfortunately, remapping escape to caps lock can lead to serious friction if you have to work with different laptops a lot, like I do. The muscle memory gets in the way a lot.
I think the corollary to this is that there are more people comfortable with living in a terminal. TUIs are more common now that there is an increased audience for them.
There's nowhere in a TUI to add oceans of padding for a ""sleek"" and ""modern"" look. There's very very little that a product manager can ""streamline"" in 80 columns of text.
There are a lot of points in there that are just generally bad in modern applications – e.g. UI inconsistencies, lack of automation and general configurability (shared ways to handle windows, layouts, keyboard shortcuts, etc.). I think it’s fair to say these things are just hugely lacking in modern operating systems. Linux might come close, but only with lots of tinkering. macOS is clearly lost and degrading now, and Windows was never close to having these qualities.
I don’t know if TUIs will be the answer, but it’s an interesting development!
the current AI summer has been great for us dorks that prefer TUI/console interfaces. I hope it all sticks around with the inevitable cool-down in LLM hype.
I do like TUIs but in the article it mentions Gnome style apps don't fit the look. That sounds like a limitation of Omarchy.
It's not too bad to theme GTK apps and have them all look a consistent way. For example I use Tokyonight Moon and Gruvbox and they both have GTK themes that look great for Firefox, Thunar, GIMP, LibreOffice and more. I don't use Omarchy but here's a few screenshots https://x.com/nickjanetakis/status/2037125261657883061/photo....
Nothing fancy was done on my end, just installed the specific GTK themes. They even support live reloading because GTK's tooling supports it, my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles handle all of it for you. I still prefer TUIs but you can have nice looking GUI apps for when you want them.
> The most popular claim is the memory consumption, which to be fair has been decreasing over the last decade, but my main complaint (as I usually drive a 64GB RAM MacBook Pro) is the lack of visual consistency and lack of keyboard-driven workflows.
Lucky you. I avoid electron apps because I'm limping along with 16gb.
The TUIs I've looked at seem to be largely NPM dependent? Bizarre that agents apparently don't have time to rewrite themselves in something that isn't a security tire fire. It kind of makes me assume that all this agents taking over stuff is from people working at garbage-pivot-garbage startups that don't really have to worry about any consequences but not being fast enough.
Go + Lipgloss + Bubbletea is by far the most robust and performant stack for building (and or generating) aesthetic and usable TUIs. Excellent DX. No npm necessary
Yeah that’s the thing, pretty much all the people who are really into ai for everything are JavaScript/Typescript developers, usually working at startups, and often in the AI field.
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.
That still doesn't address the root of the problem, which is that TUIs and Electron apps are write-once, run-anywhere, while native GUI dev is insanely fragmented.
I mean, I guess that's more or less just a summary of the blog post, but it's true. And it will remain true until the fragmentation ends, and the fragmentation won't end until Microsoft gets its act together and ships their version of SwiftUI so that some sort of abstraction layer over SwiftUI/GTK/MsftUI can be created. And since Microsoft will almost certainly never get its act together, the problem will remain.
In other words, not a blip. The UIs of the present and future will all be Electron apps and TUIs.
I think another factor is that people are rejecting the rounded corners and excessive padding of modern web design, you can't do that in a TUI, so you don't have a designer or standard practice encouraging you to do it. As implemented TUIs have greater information density than GUIs. Make no mistake though, TUIs are a decided step backwards from GUIs. Everything that you can express via text, you can also do in a text area on a GUI app.
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 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.
Are you sure about that? Most GUI toolkits have things so wired up that it’s trivial to get a small app running. The point is to get a dev up and running as quickly as possible (even if there is a lot of magic involved). If you’re okay with the defaults, it ca be very quick to get a GUI up and running.
In contrast, most TUI toolkits generally require the developer to wire things up manually. Maximum developer flexibility, but with a decent learning curve. Having an LLM available to handle the initial wiring definitely speeds things up.
I know I had a few long lasting bugs with a TUI I wrote years ago that Claude was able to find the fix for pretty quickly. These were bugs that weren’t obvious to me, partially due to the arcane nature of working within a TUI.
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.
My cynical take why TUIs are back is because people operating in the terminal became a signal that you were competent and once people figured that out everybody started doing it. The reason people were operating in the terminal is lost of them but hey it makes you look like a 1337 hacker. It's the same thing with side projects of past decades. People who had side projects cared about the craft for more than a paycheck and tended to be more competent. Then every person just trying to land a job suddenly had "side projects". Gotta have those green squares on github.
> My cynical take why TUIs are back is because people operating in the terminal became a signal that you were competent and once people figured that out everybody started doing it
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.
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.
The real reason TUIs are back is not one reason, but a host of reasons.
The biggest current reason is fashion. Tools like Claude Code did it, and while they actually had good reasons to run in the terminal, the tools' popularity and wildly different look, especially to non-terminal-native users became a signal of some positive sort.
I don't believe that any of the rationale posed in the article is a popular reason developers are using.
I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.
TUIs just solve the right problems in the same world we're already working in - the terminal.
I do a lot of work in the terminal and that's exactly why I'd rather have other windows to the side so that my terminal can stay exactly focused on what I'm doing there. Those other windows might also be terminals, but I have a big screen, and I want to make use of it to see things all at once. A GUI gives far more flexibility for arranging those multiple views.
I've sat with coworkers taking two to twelve keystrokes to flip between things that I just have side by side in separate IDE windows, browser windows, or tabs... or can switch between with a single click instead of those keystrokes.
The only hard part about vim is to be forced to strecth the finger up to Escape for what is essentially the most essential functin in modal editor: Going back to command mode. The ideal workflow is do a quick edit and go back to command ("normal") mode instantly. The fact that it's Escape is a historical artifact that needs not be.
So just remap CapsLock to escape, it system-wide, it's not that hard and it's nice to have Escape there generally. In Linux and MacOS it's just a gui setting away and in windows you just have to edit (create?) a registry key. Can be done on any machine under a minute.
Apart from that I don't see where the learning curve is since you can just start with the basics from vim-tutor and learn more when you feel you're spending time on something. I already felt faster than in any other editor when I just knew the basics. The real problem of vim is that you get used to modal editing very quickly and it feels like the stone age when you don't have it.
- No distractions from visual content
- Extreme efficiency with keyboard
- AIs can code them up quickly. It used to be a total pain
As far my opinion goes, this is biggest (and really only) reason.
I don’t know if TUIs will be the answer, but it’s an interesting development!
Don’t fall for this.
It's not too bad to theme GTK apps and have them all look a consistent way. For example I use Tokyonight Moon and Gruvbox and they both have GTK themes that look great for Firefox, Thunar, GIMP, LibreOffice and more. I don't use Omarchy but here's a few screenshots https://x.com/nickjanetakis/status/2037125261657883061/photo....
Nothing fancy was done on my end, just installed the specific GTK themes. They even support live reloading because GTK's tooling supports it, my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles handle all of it for you. I still prefer TUIs but you can have nice looking GUI apps for when you want them.
Lucky you. I avoid electron apps because I'm limping along with 16gb.
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.
I mean, I guess that's more or less just a summary of the blog post, but it's true. And it will remain true until the fragmentation ends, and the fragmentation won't end until Microsoft gets its act together and ships their version of SwiftUI so that some sort of abstraction layer over SwiftUI/GTK/MsftUI can be created. And since Microsoft will almost certainly never get its act together, the problem will remain.
In other words, not a blip. The UIs of the present and future will all be Electron apps and TUIs.
In contrast, most TUI toolkits generally require the developer to wire things up manually. Maximum developer flexibility, but with a decent learning curve. Having an LLM available to handle the initial wiring definitely speeds things up.
I know I had a few long lasting bugs with a TUI I wrote years ago that Claude was able to find the fix for pretty quickly. These were bugs that weren’t obvious to me, partially due to the arcane nature of working within a TUI.
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.
Are you saying GUI "the real deal"?
JS literally destroyed the software landscape. All the bad practices advertised as best.
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.
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.
The biggest current reason is fashion. Tools like Claude Code did it, and while they actually had good reasons to run in the terminal, the tools' popularity and wildly different look, especially to non-terminal-native users became a signal of some positive sort.
I don't believe that any of the rationale posed in the article is a popular reason developers are using.