Also, how does this handle terminal resizing? Are there options to anchor elements to the left/right etc, or will narrowing the terminal window just make everything fall off the side, or worse, all the text wraps?

The UX actually matters, and TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power (lazygit being an excellent example). But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.

> Design once, generate production-ready code for your framework of choice. Switch targets without touching your design. Alpha notice: Code export is not functional yet. We're actively working on it — check back soon.

In other words, it isn't at all usable right now. You can't produce a TUI with it, not even a limited one.

I would have expected a TUI editor to be itself a TUI.

I find the search [2] also helpful.

[1] https://terminaltrove.com/

[2] https://terminaltrove.com/explore/

It completely misses the reason people like current TUIs.

That being said, I could see a niche market for a designer persona who is used to building in tools like figma.

Also wheres the Linux version? You've Mac, windows, and docker. When someone says terminal to me I default to Linux.

On the other hand, for this work as they describe, it needs to be a complete UI framework across a bunch of languages and built on top of a bunch of existing frameworks. That seems... ambitious. Building one UI framework for one language is plenty hard enough.

Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?

I'd much rather terminals emulator provide a webview directly, and maybe use https://webtui.ironclad.sh/ if you really want the look.

I think it makes more sense for a cli to offer a mini webserver instead.

Think `fish_config`, but opened in the terminal directly [0].

[0]: like https://iterm2.com/browser-plugin.html

https://wiretext.app/w/WUtjS1bk

Browsers are ubiquitous and I can just tell ai to build a web page. I can't really see a use case other than novelty.

Something like this could genuinely help for the layout/positioning phase, even if you still hand-write the interaction logic. The debate about whether these are "real TUIs" kind of misses the point imo. Textual and Ratatui already blur that line with mouse support and rich widgets. The ship sailed on pure keyboard-only text interfaces a while ago.

What I'd actually want from a tool like this is to export to multiple TUI frameworks. Right now you're locked into one ecosystem and the code export isn't even working yet, which makes the whole thing feel premature.

also

> Gatekeeper blocks the app immediately. You'll see either "TUIStudio cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer" or "TUIStudio is damaged and can't be opened" on newer macOS after quarantine flags the binary. To get past it: right-click the .app → Open → Open anyway — or go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway".

[1] https://ratatui.rs/

VB's back, tell a friend.

This is really cool though.

Ah yes, it says clearly that on the github page. Still, if its works, I am then impressed by the LLM.

Edit: It does, in fact, NOT work for code export. Level of impressiveness massively dropped.

I mean yes, code editor are great for this but a lot of the TUIs I see are so slow it begs the question why they exist to begin. CLIs are supposed to be remixable and scriptable.

I think a better architecture would be to generally keep CLIs work like CLIs and have separate processes that add terminal rendering functionalities for those that need / want it but in general it is an anti-pattern to start from this as default.

I launched https://github.com/alganet/tuish yesterday (pure shell backend).

Exporting to pure shell could be a killer feature, especially for smaller and ad-hoc apps (no dependencies, no compilation, etc).

I don't think there is utf8 characters that allow for drawing on the outside of the cell, (happy to be wrong)

┌ (U+250C), ┐ (U+2510), └ (U+2514), ┘ (U+2518) <-- these 4 draw in the middle of the cell.

｢ (U+FF62), ⌟, (U+231F), <-- these are two that cover part of the outside, but not the other corners.

｢┐└｣

Can anyone tells me how to get those 'corner of cell' characters, including uprights and horizontals ?

The fact that even the preview isn't a TUI is just lame. Keyboard controls are also non-functional right now.

One of the most original ideas I have seen on HackerNews in the past few years.

Another W from the web developers mafia

The only reason I can think of is what I said before [0] given that the web was destroyed by the same web developers, then so was the desktop (with Electron) and now of all places terminals are now getting destroyed with infinite slop like this.

This nonsense will continue and accelerate until it reaches hardware.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210187