UI/Text-based

• TUI - a Terminal User Interface

  • A full-screen, cursor-addressed, keyboard-driven interface drawn in text inside a terminal. The distinction from a CLI/Tool is statefulness: a CLI prints and exits, a TUI holds the screen and waits.

  • Frameworks

    • Ratatui — Rust library, community fork of tui-rs (2023). Most of the Rust entries below sit on it.
    • Charm — the Go equivalent: Bubble Tea for structure, Lip Gloss for styling, Glamour for Markdown rendering, and gum to reach the same ideas from shell scripts without writing Go.
    • Curses — the ncurses lineage the whole category descends from.

  • By what they wrap

    • git, containers, tasks

      • Lazygit — Person/Jesse Duffield
      • tuicr — Person/Almog Gavra; code-review TUI that can push comments to GitHub/GitLab
      • Lazydocker — same author, same spirit, for containers and images
      • mani — many git/repos at once from a declarative mani.yaml
      • BeansTasks — git-backed issue tracker aimed at AI agents

    • files and shell

      • yazi — Terminal/File/Manager built on async I/O
      • atuin — shell history in SQLite, with encrypted sync across machines

    • reading and messaging

      • Neomd — email: Neovim to compose, Markdown to read, senders screened once
      • eilmeldung — RSS, on the news-flash library
      • HN/TUI — Hacker News
      • bitchat/tui — peer-to-peer chat over Bluetooth LE, off-grid
      • basalt — Obsidian vaults

    • music and audio

      • Spotify/Tool/TUI — comparison of spotify-player, ncspot, and spotify-tui
      • Person/sihooleebd/GitHub/orbit — local MP3 player
      • Person/joshjetson/GitHub/phosphor — DAW with both TUI and GUI front ends

    • everything else

      • apisnip — walk the structure of an openapi.json from the terminal
      • Game/Video/Rebels in the Sky — space pirates playing basketball, on Ratatui

  • Implementation language

    • Rust — apisnip, atuin, basalt, bitchat/tui, eilmeldung, Ratatui, spotify-player, tuicr, yazi, Person/joshjetson/GitHub/phosphor, Person/sihooleebd/GitHub/orbit
    • Go — Lazygit, Lazydocker, mani, Neomd

  • Finding more

    • Terminal/Trove — aggregator for TUIs and CLI tools; many of the pages above arrived through it.

  • Open questions

    • TUI/Q/Can you use agentic engineering tools to test TUI or Curses applications