Building a TUI is easy now(hatchet.run)
60 points by abelanger 5 hours ago | 54 comments
- elevation 1 hour agoAs LLMs consume all our compute resources and drive up prices for the compute hardware on which we run applications, the silver lining is that LLMs are helpful in implementing tooling without a heavy stack so it will run quickly on a lower-spec computer.
I've achieved 3 and 4 orders of magnitude CPU performance boosts and 50% RAM reductions using C in places I wouldn't normally and by selecting/designing efficient data structures. TUIs are a good example of this trend. For internal engineering, to be able to present the information we need while bypassing the millions of SLoC in the webstack is more efficient in almost every regard.
[-]- mseepgood 1 hour agoThe question is how many decades each user of your software would have to use it in order to offset, through the optimisation it provides, the energy consumption you burned through with LLMs.[-]
- grogenaut 43 minutes agoIn the past week I made 4 different tasks that were going to make my m4brun at full tilt for a week optimized down to 20 minutes with just a few prompts. So more like an hour to pay off not decades. average claude invocation is .3 wh. m4 usez 40-60 watts, so 24x7x40 >> .3 * 10
- elevation 39 minutes agoWhen global supply chains are disrupted again, energy and/or compute costs will skyrocket, meaning your org may be forced to defer hardware upgrades and LLMs may no longer be cost effective (as over-leveraged AI companies attempt to recover their investment with less hardware than they'd planned.) Once this happens, it may be too late to draw on LLMs to quickly refactor your code.
If your business requirements are stable and you have a good test suite, you're living in a golden age for leveraging your current access to LLMs to reduce your future operational costs.
- embedding-shape 50 minutes agoEspecially considering that suddenly everyone and their mother create their own software with LLMs instead of using almost-perfect-but-slighty-non-ideal software others written before.
- mulmen 48 minutes agoI’m not really worried about energy consumption. We have more energy falling out of the sky than we could ever need. I’m much more interested in saving human time so we can focus on bigger problems, like using that free energy instead of killing ourselves extracting and burning limited resources.
- dwb 40 minutes agoI think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s a sorry state of affairs.
- SoftTalker 1 hour agoI don't see any real advantage of TUIs over web forms or GUIs for the same thing.
I do like CLIs though, especially the ones that are properly capable of working in pipelines. Composing a pipeline of simple command-line utilities to achieve exactly what you want is very powerful.
[-]- PeterWhittaker 27 minutes agoThere are some applications/systems for which certifying bodies forbid the use of web management because of vulnerabilities in both the protocols and the clients and servers. For example, in my daily, several national cyber organizations (NSA, CSE, GCHQ, etc.) have such direction. That's why our main product line is managed using a TUI accessed at the local console or over SSH (with very, very carefully curated SELinux MAC, among other things).
Having said that....
If one is willing to build one's own HTTP server with integrated MAC, etc., and is able to demonstrate mitigations against known vulnerabilities, one may be able to get the certifying bodies on board. Time will tell.
Yes, this is very niche, but TUIs are in general niche.
- 1123581321 54 minutes agoI like a TUI when I always want an app to run side by side with a CLI. It’s easier to do split windows in a terminal or tmux/zellij panes than to script two separate app windows to stay locked together as a pair. Although, I’d welcome advice as to how to do it better.
I also find TUIs are easier to program for the same reason they’re limited. Fewer human interface aspects in play and it’s not offensive to use the same UI across OSes. (There are still under-the-hood differences across OSes, e.g. efficient file event watching.)
- qingcharles 38 minutes agoGemini made a lovely TUI for my C# project, but afterwards it said it could just spin up a Kestrel web server inside the app instead which would be a much better solution for managing it, which was fair. (I have a line in my Agents to warn me when I specify a way of building something and it's not the ideal solution)
- baq 53 minutes agoTUIs work well over ssh. Pretty much everything else is a pain in the ass in some capacity, especially when the ssh client is a smartphone.
- christophilus 1 hour agoTUIs are much easier to run in a container, for one thing. Though, I guess a terminal-based web browser would work for some web apps.
- sophacles 1 hour agoHaving a tui file picker in the pipeline can be a powerful technique. Sometimes it just makes sense to have an interface that is slightly more interactive than pre-selecting all the files makes the flow smoother. Being able to put that into a script/alias/whatever is nice.
Other CLI things benefit from this "have a minimal ui interface in the workflow for the one step where it makes sense".
- verdverm 1 hour agoI just added a TUI built on Charm for my custom agent. I primarily use it for two things.
1. Navigating all my chat sessions and doing admin work. It's super fast to push a single key to go in and see what it was about before deleting it.
2. Testing out features and code changes without the web UI / vs code extension complexity.
3. Places where I cannot connect VS Code. I still want to chat and see diffs, a TUI is much easier than a CLI for this.
It also has a CLI, basically three interfaces (CLI, TUI, GUI (vscode/webapp)) to the core features of my personal swiss army knife (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof)
- pelcg 1 hour agoSome of my personal favourites TUI are all over GitHub and there are lots of them to have a look at can be found here:
https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
https://terminaltrove.com/explore/
Building for Charm, ratatui and many others is really getting much easier than before thanks to AI.
- qingcharles 42 minutes agoGemini built a nice TUI for me for a DHT scraper project I was coding:
It was like two-shot, cos the first version had some issues with CJK chars.
I was impressed as it would have taken me a bunch of screwing around on lining up all the data etc when I wanted to concentrate on the scraping algorithm, not the pretty bits.
- d4rkp4ttern 34 minutes agoIndeed. Over a few days of iterations I had this TUI built for fast full-text search of Claude Code or Codex sessions using Ratatui (and Tantivy for the full-text search index). I would never have dreamed of this pre coding agents.
https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/tools/aichat/...
- nout 1 hour agoI think mc (Midnight Commander) is still one of the best TUIs available - it's very close in capability to the GUI versions (like Double Commander) and it has the benefits of tuis - like that you can run it on a remote system. It looks outdated, but I'm actually now working on a new skin that will hopefully be included in the next release of mc.
- esafak 2 hours agoIf it was so easy Anthropic wouldn't have messed up CC for so long. The author takes for granted the availability of good off-the-shelf TUI libraries for his chosen language.
- esclerofilo 1 hour agoI too enjoy the charm TUI libraries, and have been using them to build a settlers of Catan game[0]. And some features are really cool, like different colors depending on dark/light theme.
They have a bunch of functions that concatenate strings, which may not be very efficient compared to using string.builders, but I haven't yet had performance problems.
However I haven't had such a great experience with AI, IMO they're bad at ASCII art.
- zokier 1 hour agoBig reason why TUIs were popular in the first place is because they are so much simpler to build. Compare ncurses to GTK/Qt, they are completely different leagues. One of my pet ideas is to build a ncurses compatible/style library that skips terminal layer and instead renders directly to Wayland, kinda getting the simplicity of ncurses without dragging all the legacy junk with it.[-]
- CuriouslyC 51 minutes agoYet ironically getting Claude Code to run at 60fps is way way harder in a TUI? Kinda funny that they optimized for "simple" then footgunned themselves into a client that probably took thousands of man hours to get to a reasonable place for power users.[-]
- weebull 49 minutes ago> Yet ironically getting Claude Code to run at 60fps is way way harder in a TUI?
That's what happens when you vibe code your app.
- socalgal2 2 hours agoDo we want tuis?
I can’t stand Gemmin-CLI. That tui gets in the way constantly
I’m mixed in jj’s tui. It’s better than no ui tho
Mostly tho I’m curious when I’d want a tui. Most of the time in a terminal I don’t want one
[-]- 2muchtime 1 hour agoI do.
I want my interfacing with computers to be mouseless and TUIs offer that. I don’t think I’ve run into a GUI, no matter how many hotkeys it has and I know, where I didn’t have to reach for the mouse.
CLI only also requires remembering commands, some of which I use very infrequently, thus need to look up every time I use them.
I think TUIs hold a very nice spot between GUIs and CLI.
[-]- verdverm 1 hour agoVS Code with the Vim extension is largely mouseless
I use the TUI from a terminal tab in VS Code, my agent works with that and the custom extension with a webapp based interface, seamlessly and concurrently
GUIs, TUIs, and PR/kanban all make sense in different situations. We'll all use at least two of them on regular basis for coding agents.
TUIs make way less sense for your average user
[-]- dualogy 13 minutes ago> VS Code with the Vim extension is largely mouseless
It's also easily mouseless without any Vim or like extension. I never mouse in it, having given intuitive-to-me keychords to all the various moves I need to make beyond the standard stuff.
[-]- verdverm 10 minutes agotrue, I would never have moved over if I had to give up my vim bindings and modes
- liveoneggs 1 hour agoI just want a stream, not a TUI. If you can't | it it's not real[-]
- hnlmorg 25 minutes agoThere’s no reason why you can’t have both.
Well behaved CLI tools have for years already been changing their UX depending on whether STDOUT is a TTY or a pipe.
- rirze 47 minutes agoHave you tried jjui? It’s pretty nice
- christophilus 1 hour agoThere are plenty of great tools available these days. Bubbletea would be my tool of choice, I think:[-]
- verdverm 1 hour agoCharm is what the post submission is using
- tantalor 48 minutes ago> most importantly, they live inline to your code, preventing constant tab switching
No idea what this means.
[-]- prydt 43 minutes agoI think the implicit assumption here is that you are using a terminal-based code editor like neovim... which is not necessarily true.
- oj-hn-dot-com 44 minutes agoI think the reference is to all the TUI based coding tools now like opencode.
- empath75 43 minutes agoI was working on a fairly niche thing, a library of crossplane compositions written in KCL and thought it would be nice to have a TUI so i could browse through them and see the rendered yaml as claude was working on it. I asked claude code to write it with python and textual and it one shotted it in about two minutes including a test suite.
- keybored 1 hour agoBuilding an article is easy now.
- emilfihlman 2 hours agoThe thing with TUIs is that, using mobile native virtual keyboards, it's apparently quite impossible to make them behave in a sane way in browsers!
I think the only reasonable option seems to be reimplementing one yourself, which is massively stupid.
[-]- NetOpWibby 2 hours agoMobile is not for TUI[-]
- emilfihlman 33 minutes agoSure it is. I, and millions of others, use it all the time with for example Termux.
- avaer 2 hours agoIf you have a TUI the correct way to support mobile browsers is to 1-shot a React page equivalent. Trying to make the mobile keyboard work for this would be silly.
- verdverm 1 hour agoDagger has a really nice TUI built on Charm. It reads OTEL to create an interactive tree for your builds and containers. If you have cloud setup, it will also push that all to a webapp interface where you can share and navigate in perpetuity. This works for both CI and local runs, super cool for sharing links to failed builds during dev, even while the dev's local build is still running
- fragmede 1 hour agoThey are! I (well, Claude) built nitpick as a TUI HN client, and it was surprisingly easy to do.
- fragmede 1 hour agoThe problem with TUI's, that we have all Stockholm syndrom'd ourselves, is that I can't use the mouse cursor to click to the position on the screen and edit the command line.[-]
- baq 51 minutes agoI’ve built textual tuis (as in the Python library) and it responds to clicks just fine.
- willm 1 hour agoIt is possible. Terminals have supported mouse interactions for a long time.
- verdverm 1 hour agoYou can use the mouse with TUIs build on the Charm stack
https://github.com/lrstanley/bubblezone
There are a lot of components that resemble things you find in web component libraries
- themafia 34 minutes ago"Creating garbage is easy now."
It runs poorly, loses keystrokes, and easily gets bogged down with too much terminal input.
I don't want candy coated monospace ASCII graphics. I want something fast and functional. The graphics are _entirely_ secondary. You've missed the point of what a TUI is.
- its_magic 2 hours ago[dead]