Design Terminal UIs (Website)
TUIStudio brings Figma-style visual editing to terminal user interfaces, letting developers design CLI apps with drag-and-drop components instead of hand-coding ANSI layouts.
What: TUIStudio is a desktop application that provides a visual canvas for designing terminal UIs with 20+ built-in components (buttons, tables, modals, etc.), multiple layout engines, and planned one-click export to six TUI frameworks including Ink, BubbleTea, Blessed, Textual, OpenTUI, and Tview.
Why it matters: Building terminal interfaces traditionally requires manually juggling ANSI escape codes and layout math; a visual editor could significantly lower the barrier to creating polished CLI tools like htop or lazygit, though the code export feature isn't functional yet in this alpha release.
Takeaway: Download the free Mac/Windows app or check the GitHub repo to try the visual editor, but note that code export is not yet working in the current alpha version.
Decoder
- TUI (Text User Interface): Interactive terminal applications built with characters and ANSI codes rather than graphical windows, like htop or lazygit
- ANSI escape codes: Special character sequences that control terminal colors, cursor positioning, and text formatting
- Ink: React-based framework for building terminal UIs with TypeScript/JavaScript
- BubbleTea: Go framework using Elm architecture for terminal applications
- Blessed: Node.js library for building terminal interfaces
- Textual: Modern Python framework for creating TUIs with rich widgets
- Tview: Go library providing terminal UI widgets and layouts
Original article
TUIStudio is a Figma-like visual editor for designing terminal user interfaces (TUIs) with drag-and-drop components and real-time ANSI preview.