I have a confession that will probably get my developer card revoked: I have never been good at designing terminal user interfaces. I can write a backend that processes fourteen thousand requests per second without breaking a sweat, but ask me to lay out a table next to a sidebar in a TUI and I will spend forty-five minutes staring at character widths like they personally offended me.
So when TUI Studio showed up on Hacker News last week with 522 upvotes and the tagline "A Figma-like visual editor for terminal applications," I did what any reasonable person would do. I dropped everything, downloaded it, and spent my entire Saturday morning dragging boxes around a canvas instead of finishing the sprint I promised my team lead I would close by Friday.
What Exactly Is TUI Studio?
TUI Studio is an open-source macOS application (Apple Silicon only for now — M1 through M4) that gives you a visual canvas for designing terminal user interfaces. Think of it as Figma, but instead of designing web pages, you are designing the kind of applications that live inside your terminal — things like htop, lazygit, or k9s.
The editor ships with 21 built-in components: Screen, Box, Button, TextInput, Checkbox, Radio, Select, Toggle, Text, Spinner, ProgressBar, Table, List, Tree, Menu, Tabs, Breadcrumb, Modal, Popover, Tooltip, and Spacer. You drag them onto the canvas, tweak their properties in a side panel, and watch the live ANSI preview update in real time.
The Layout Engine Is Where Things Get Interesting
Here is what genuinely surprised me: TUI Studio supports three layout modes — Absolute, Flexbox, and Grid. Yes, the same CSS layout paradigms you know from web development, except applied to terminal characters instead of pixels.
My colleague Derek — who has been building Go CLI tools for about six years now — tried it out after I would not stop messaging him about it. His first reaction was, and I am quoting directly from Slack: "Wait, I can just... flex-direction: column my TUI panels? Why has nobody done this before?"
Fair question, Derek. Fair question.
The property controls feel comprehensive for an alpha release. You get full control over sizing, padding, margins, alignment, and even color theming. Speaking of which — the app ships with eight built-in color themes: Dracula, Nord, Solarized, Monokai, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night, Nightfox, and Sonokai. Switching themes updates the canvas live, which means you can see exactly how your design looks under each palette without restarting anything.
Six Framework Exports — Eventually
The headline feature that got most of those Hacker News upvotes is multi-framework code export. TUI Studio promises to generate production-ready code for six frameworks:
- Ink (TypeScript) — React-based terminal rendering
- BubbleTea (Go) — The Go community darling for TUI apps
- Blessed (JavaScript) — The classic Node.js TUI library
- Textual (Python) — Rich and Textual from Will McGugan
- OpenTUI (TypeScript) — A newer entrant in the space
- Tview (Go) — Another popular Go option for terminal UIs
Now here is the honest part that I think every review should mention upfront: code export does not actually work yet. The application is in alpha, and the export feature is explicitly marked as coming soon. The developer is transparent about this — there is a clear alpha notice on the website — but I have seen a few excited tweets that gloss over this detail, and I think that does the project a disservice.
The Day-to-Day Workflow Experience
Sandra from our design team — yes, we actually asked a designer to try a terminal UI tool, which went about as well as you would expect for the first ten minutes — made an observation that stuck with me. She said the command palette and component toolbar feel natural because they borrow conventions from tools designers already know. The cognitive load of switching from Figma to TUI Studio is surprisingly low.
Projects save as portable .tui JSON files, which means version control works naturally. You can commit your TUI designs alongside your code, review them in pull requests, and share them across teams. For organizations building multiple CLI tools (and I know at least three enterprise teams in my network that maintain five or more internal CLIs), this could be a genuine workflow improvement.
I spent about two hours prototyping a dashboard layout for a monitoring tool our team has been discussing. Normally that process involves me sketching on paper, arguing with a colleague about column widths, and then discovering in code that nothing fits the way I imagined. With TUI Studio, I had a visual prototype in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes. The remaining hour and forty minutes? I spent those trying different themes. Priorities.
The Elephant in the Terminal
Let us talk about what this means for the broader TUI ecosystem. Terminal applications are having a moment. Between Warp raising $72 million, Ghostty gaining massive adoption, and tools like Zellij and Rio carving out enthusiastic communities, there is clearly an appetite for better terminal experiences.
But designing those experiences has remained stuck in the "hand-code everything and pray it aligns" era. I spent three hours last month trying to get a BubbleTea layout to behave on terminals narrower than 80 columns. Three hours. For something a visual editor could have shown me in thirty seconds — "hey, your table overflows here, maybe add a scroll wrapper."
TUI Studio does not solve that problem yet (alpha, remember), but it points at a future where it could. And frankly, the fact that someone is even attempting to bridge the gap between visual design tools and terminal development feels significant.
Platform Limitations and What Is Next
The macOS-only restriction is real and will frustrate a lot of potential users. The majority of CLI tool developers I know work on Linux, and a significant chunk of them would rather debug a segfault blindfolded than touch a Mac. Given that the project is open source on GitHub, I would expect community contributions to expand platform support, but that takes time and contributors.
There is also the question of how well the generated code will handle edge cases — responsive terminal resizing, accessibility, Unicode width calculation, and the thousand other gotchas that make TUI development the special kind of suffering it is. A visual editor is only as good as the code it produces, and until export actually ships, we are evaluating potential rather than reality.
The Bottom Line
TUI Studio is early, incomplete, and limited to one platform. It is also the most interesting thing to happen to terminal UI development in years. The 21-component library, three-layout-mode engine, and eight-theme system give it a solid foundation. If the team delivers on the code export promise, this could become the standard tool for TUI prototyping across the Go, Python, TypeScript, and JavaScript ecosystems.
I will be watching this one closely. And if you see me in Slack arguing about Flexbox in a terminal context at 2 AM, you will know who to blame.
TUI Studio is available as a free download from tui.studio. Source code is on GitHub.
