> The reality is different. Most modern Text User Interfaces (TUIs) are often more hostile to accessibility than poorly coded graphical interfaces.
The Claude Code rendering UI is the first place where I realized the TUI is more like a DOS or Borland UI system rather than a command line interface.
I was poking about CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 setting when I realized what exactly this TUI is, it is layers of stuff showing up on top of each other with terminal codes.
Ended up reading the Ink Terminal implementation of React
Fascinating how it ends up looking Wordperfect or Wordstar from the past instead of pixel based graphics.
The usability for a vision impaired user is about the same, though I remember braille pads for DOS tools (80x25) which work better than all the screen readers which came later.
The more you look into these trendy TUIs the worse it gets -- it's like the developers took the accumulation of all the worst practices since the dawn of programming, and wrapped it all into one unwieldy, overweight, under-performant gelatinous blob that threatens to collapse under its own weight.
But what _is_ a "Text User Interface"? Google Images just returns what is being discussed here: "GUIs" that run in some kind of text mode. And to me, that's also what a TUI is.
A more textually oriented environment (like a normal Unix shell) is, in my experience, usually referred to as a CLI: Command Line Interface.
I did find an interesting hybrid in the Pi coding agent: it seems to leverage the normal terminal scrollback, while still enhancing it with things like transient input fields and status lines, so that it can display those without cluttering scrollback.
That's pretty much the distinction. A CLI is stream-oriented, may accept user input from standard in and/or write to standard out with buffered I/O; a TUI is full-screen, interactive (responds immediately to keystrokes), and uses text characters to represent visual elements.
Actually, I think that is close to a good name for them: Terminal-based GUIs.
Some are pretty useful, for instance I like lazygit as a simple dashboard/panel for a small repo (or when making small changes to a larger one), some make me wonder what those who made them were smoking!
The less silly ones are handy when you are tinkering with a far away machine and want something a little more interactive than CLI commands and stuff connected by pipes and scripts but don't want to deal with the latency of GUI remoting. Some, though, are so badly thought out that they are slower than using a browser over long-distance X…
There are useful ones. Something like Midnight Commander can be way better than lots of manual copy and move commands. The kernel config one is way nicer than the stream style kernel configuration tool. Some of these newer ones are starting to feel more like “text mode bling” than useful.
My objection to TUI is I don’t think it’s clear enough for what’s happening here. I think you could easily argue that applies to most readline style stream CLI programs.
Would you call a fully 3D UI in VR, not a planar in the VR world but true 3D, a GUI? It is graphical by definition. But if you talked to someone about a GUI that’s not what they’d think you’re talking about without additional context.
That’s my objection. I think TUI implies way less than what these programs are doing. Yeah it can describe them but I don’t think it should be the word for them.
the first and second are graphics terminals which is muddling up the definition. of course they were called terminals back then until we decided to make a distinction. what they are called is not the point. the point is the distinction. for today's discussion terminal means text without graphics, as shown in the third video.
the real question is why are we still using text terminals?
the short answer is that on remote connections graphics is still a performance issue. in fact the popular solution to making remote graphics performant is webbrowsers. they are the graphical terminals of today.
if i want to build a graphical interface to a remote service, then i build a webinterface.
locally, the answer is historical tools, and that text interfaces are easier to develop and still more efficient to use. but not easier. especially commandline tools without an actual visual interface.
i just had this situation. the dolphin filemanager has a feature to add tags and comments to files. the interface is very clunky. but there is a commandline that lets me set those tags and comments which is much more efficient once you learned how to use that command.
As for the third example, note that the programs discussed here (arguably TUI) are unlikely to work on this type of terminal. Unless the program has a built-in mode that allows it to run in true command-line mode (arguably CLI). Just like vi/ex.
Of course, these were just examples to show that a computer terminal didn’t have to - and doesn’t have to - be like a VT100 or similar. And I realize that nowadays, when we hear the word "terminal," we tend to think of something like a VT100. Especially since the Linux (kernel) includes emulation for something like that.
However, historically, the first devices to be called computer terminals (and to enable interactive operation) were typewriters and teletypes. That is why one of the names given to newer CRT terminals was "glass teletypes."
To distinguish these terminals from their predecessors, they were also referred as video terminals (VT) or video display units (VDU) etc.
Note that in addition to built-in VT102/VT220 emulation, xterm also includes built-in Tektronix 4014 emulation, which, to use your terminology, is a graphics terminal.
But on the topic, IMHO those "text terminals" represent the lowest common denominator, and using them as a user interface causes the least friction compared to true GUIs. For example, after booting Linux, I can basically start using those TUI programs right away without having to install or configure a graphical environment (X11 or Wayland). Remote computing also causes less friction and can essentially be used out of the box.
And TUI programs, like GUI programs, also make it easier and faster to explore compared to programs that run exclusively in CLI mode.
Personally I regret that Plan9-style computing and Oberon/ACME user interfaces didn’t become mainstream...
i have in more than 30 years of using X11 never once seen an application that would actually use that tektronix emulation. so i am absolutely clueless in what it can do and how it works. i'd really love to see that and especially learn how it works remotely. apparently telnet has support for it.
> the short answer is that on remote connections graphics is still a performance issue
Wrong answer. Performant remote graphics is a solved problem (streaming video services like Netflix and online graphics-heavy games like Fortnite wouldn't exist otherwise).
Text terminals still exist because text is - currently - the most flexible and powerful method to provide commands, simple to complex. In a GUI you're usually using a mouse/touchpad/etc to navigate menus, click buttons, etc. And the more flexible the app and complex the ask, the more noisy or tedious the GUI will be. I'm unsure if it's still a thing today, but I remember when I was a Windows user and had to click through multiple windows selecting various options to get a regular app installed.
Meanwhile with a CLI, you type in a command with arguments and options, and everything remains relatively very clean and visible regardless of how complex the ask. Like installing something via CLI is maybe 5 elements on average.
those are not remote graphics applications. streaming is one way, and on slow connections it still fails. fortnite is local graphics. like a webbrowser. i already mentioned that. by remote graphics i mean a GUI application that runs 100% on a remote machine, and displays the output locally. like streaming, it depends on a fast connection. unlike streaming the fast connection needs to go both ways and it needs low latency (streaming doesn't need low latency, it just needs bandwidth.
your other example is similar to mine. but, in my opinion there is no reason why we couldn't have better graphical visualization of the commands we type. the browser model seems to be the right approach. local graphics working with remote data structures.
But has to be reasonably performant for a decent experience.
> fortnite is local graphics
And commands have to be sent to the server with minimum latency.
Bringing the capabilities of streaming and online gaming together means VNC is a non-issue, as the 2 have far more stringent requirements than the latter. A VNC connection is primarily streaming small diffs for the majority of a session (only occasionally does the full screen need to be sent) and input commands which aren't very latency sensitive; there isn't much to it.
> better graphical visualization of the commands we type
It's possible, but not necessary, and is counterproductive when it harms accessibility, which it often does. The browser is the worse thing out there IMO, because web devs are pushing JavaScript everywhere and hurting the experience for many. Things are supposed to function well for the user, but the focus nowadays is on shoving meaningless animations into things that should just be simple text, and ads into everything, which inevitably leads to far more noise rather than function.
A shell is the environmental manager, the terminal is the display device, and the window is the container. Add in tabs, web panes and sticky notes + make it all agentic, you get Hyperia: https://hyperia.nuts.services
I use ghostty and tmux, that makes it really nice to be in th terminal and have access to good TUIs. I use neovim and k9s mostly and those are such amazinng tools, AI stuff sure but that’s because I don’t really have any other choice. I also use lazygit lately but that’s mostly to get familiar and to have a nicer view of commit history than ’git log —graph’. Also I hate electron apps so well made TUIs are a step up compared to running a web browser for one app.
I've always been a bit mystified by the popularity of TUIs. To me, the power of the terminal is the streaming model. Composible utilities is something that is much less common in GUIs.
I get it that maybe the constraints of terminals force design of TUIs to be more focused on the purpose of the tool than polish, but it's not that compelling of a point to me.
For some basic stuff like vim it works fine. But for almost everything else I'd rather a regular CLI tool or a web interface. I suspect a lot of the popularity comes from people who want to feel like a hacker using 10 terminal windows, but actually want a GUI like experience.
For me, TUIs compensate for the fact that I can't get good remote GUI rendering on Linux. Yes, X11 tunneling exists, but the experience has always been abysmal for me for anything not hosted on a machine that sits on the same LAN as the client. For Wayland I don't even know if such a thing is possible since I don't think the architecture supports it.
But the terminal is just fundamentally the wrong basic abstraction on which to build a structured GUI, it just happens to require few enough bits to be sent over the wire that it actually works reasonably well over SSH as opposed to pushing graphics.
I have never tried it until now, and I hadn't looked into it. But I just tried `waypipe ssh` to a remote server I have for doing asynchronous Claude work in VMs, and it actually works pretty great! Maybe I'll switch to that for my emacs/magit setup, the lack of clipboard integration when running emacs in a terminal over ssh is enough of an argument for me.
Edit: yikes, pressing M-w caused emacs-pgtk to crash with a Wayland protocol error, so it isn't trivial and requires some configuring I guess.
Edit 2: Apparently I have to install wl-clipboard and write a bunch of emacs lisp to work around this. I don't think I have the patience for that, and I fear that such problems will be even harder to solve for applications which are not as flexible and programmable as emacs. So far I'll conclude that remote Wayland is not ready and stick to TUI.
Edit 3: No, the problem is probably mismatched waypipe versions on client and server. Still not fun.
> Yes, X11 tunneling exists, but the experience has always been abysmal for me for anything not hosted on a machine that sits on the same LAN as the client.
I have used X11 tunnelling to machines on the other side of Europe and it was OK. I did prefer ssh for responsiveness. What happened to NX? What about other remote desktops?
Obviously people want GUIs. That's why TUIs should be compared to GUIs, not to CLIs. TUIs are nice since you get a lot of the benefits of a GUI, without having to leave the context of the terminal.
I feel like the better solution here (than trying to shoehorn a GUI into an interface meant for text) is to make terminal windows graphically-aware, like how things work in Plan 9.
I already do use tiling window managers and they don't really accomplish the “if you launch a graphical app in a terminal window it takes over that terminal window” flow. Closest I've found is Niri's support for tabbed windows, but even that's just sticking the graphical app window on top of the terminal window instead of the terminal window itself becoming the app window.
Depends, I'm building a markdown down editor that just previews in the web ui. However, I can use the web ui to do tasks like uploading files, view git commits etc. Different interfaces for different purposes. The CLI gives me focused mode, and then visual stuff that steal my time goes in the web
I dunno, pre-LLM TUI's at least tended to be okay, and keyboard navigation was a first class citizen. Besides, if you were using a TUI instead of a GUI then you basically always ended up saving memory/battery life, and TUI programs are generally more portable than trying to run some ancient GUI program.
I typically prefer CLI myself but having a TUI to manage torrents for instance was much more ergonomic.
A lot of the complaints in this thread seem like they're aimed more at recent vibecoded UIs than the concept of a TUI.
Like, okay, they are a big step back with accessibility, but they're flickering garbage because they were vibecoded in a weekend and the TS or Python library they're built on was similarly forced upon this world.
For almost every tui, a webui works better imo. Most torrent clients offer a web management ui and it's always going to be easier and more feature filled using a platform that was actually designed for it rather than hacking a gui in to the terminal.
Well, "better" is relative. Web UIs definitely have the advantage you are mentioning. However, they are also much slower to use, so it is a tradeoff.
I am blind and do rely on accessiblity. But I would choose a TUI over a Web UI every day simply because the web is slow as hell. Feels like running away from a "monster" in a dream. You have rich details, but you are being drowned in unnecessary verbosity and an inherently slow stack of tools working together.
The web might be accessible, but it is barelyuseable in practice.
Its more or less the same with every screen reader and browser I know. If there was a simple fix for this inherent issue, I wouldn't have to talk about it. You might get a bit of stuff out of the way if you configure less verbosity of the screen reader, but it doesn't really help with slow interactions. Problems include:
* Virtual buffer: In most systems, the DOM is rendered to a "virtual buffer" and the screen reader lets you navigate that, because cursor (caret) support was on the map for accessibility, but was never really sufficiently implemented on the browser side. So screen readers had to solve it in a separate step.
* Using the keyboard to do screen reading and navigation on a site conflicts with keyboard shortcuts from that site. So most screen reader have two modes: You switch between entering text in a field and navigating/reading the site. Its basically like vi insert mode, but less simple.
Those are the major issues from my POV. The rest of the slowness likely comes from having to go through the accessibility API of your OS.
Vim is special because 99% of what we do is editing text, and it is the text editor—the importance of that task overcomes the poor discoverability of a TUI. Most other programs should be CLI, so they can fit in the conventional command line toolbox.
For the Claude Code / OpenCode / Crush / etc new wave TUIs, it's not about composability or text streaming. It's basically a combination of a few tailwinds:
1. There's already a large-ish community of engineers who live in the terminal e.g. Vim/Neovim/tmux/zellij/etc users. Lots of engineering tasks are accomplished by running scripts in a terminal, so it makes sense for some people to just move as much of their work there as possible. This means there's a set of users you can address with dev tools that run in a terminal.
2. Cross-platform distribution among the platforms most of those people care about — macOS and Linux — is largely a solved problem via package managers. Distributing cross-platform native apps is fragmented at best.
3. Building modern TUIs has become a lot easier thanks to the demand+distribution wins above: there's a lot of appetite for building blocks, and so lots of good options have flourished like Ink for React, Bubble Tea for Go, etc.
4. General developer distaste for the most straightforward analogue to all of this for desktop GUIs: Electron. Deservedly or not it's associated with slow, bloated applications. And if you don't use Electron, doing cross-platform anything is going to be a much harder problem than just pushing out a quick TUI app.
Eventually successful products seem to eventually jump the gap, like Claude Code eventually spawning Claude Cowork and OpenCode adding OpenCode Web. But it's easier and faster to test product market fit for dev tools with a TUI. And plenty of your users will stay there, even after you launch something else.
While I agree in principle (slack works just fine as a firefox tab, thank you very much), if the application needs filesystem access, it's not going to be viable.
These were using 66GB compared to what, few KB/MB In NCurses? I can run Nethack/Slashem under a 30 yeard of computer. React it's a joke, and there are ports of Ncurses to any OS.
Totally out of fashion today but think of TN3270. Rather than "streaming" they were forms based and heavily keyboard driven.
This could easily be mimicked by a GUI but keyboard shortcuts has become an afterthought.
I still today meet users missing those old workflows. But they express it as "old text interface" aka TUI. If you listen to them you realize they mean blazing fast and shortcut driven. When you work with data entry you care about speed - not animations.
Any beginner likes eye candy. The veteran has stopped caring.
2) Constraints imposed by the terminal make all the apps look and work approximately the same - in the outside world the standards developed for UX are ignored as a matter of routine just because they can be. TUIs are in an optimum of least surprise, so to speak.
The command line shell has that benefit of piping text between programs. TUIs are runnable from the command line shell. -- So you can get many of the benefits of a GUI (e.g. discoverability) while sticking close to the terminal where you're doing things.
If you're going to "run command, edit command, run command", performing the edits from the terminal you're running the commands in seems reasonable/intuitive. (In contrast, for tools like VSCode, I think it's more common for terminals to take up a fraction of the screen space rather than switching it to full screen. And then developers will say they need a huge monitor).
It also seems to be that keyboard-driven programs are more commonly TUI than GUI. e.g. magit or lazygit. Or lazydocker. Or k9s.
>I've always been a bit mystified by the popularity of TUIs. To me, the power of the terminal is the streaming model.
Ever used Emacs? Or Vim? Or Mutt? Or Borland's old IDEs?
The power of the terminal is also in ubiquitness, trivial connection to a remote system, and lack of mountains of GUI cruft, that a TUI app can as well have.
* Lower resource load
* Less reliance on a mouse
* Related: key bindings for more activities that fit my vi muscle memory
* Deeper organization.
Thanks to TUI tools I've been able to roll my own IDE that's invisible when I need it to be (thanks guake & yakuake) and organized by project and tab (thanks zellij). For the mixed role I'm in that works perfectly.
I don't think anybody would look at what I have and call it polished though.
For me it’s mostly
- the convenience of being in the terminal, where I live
- you can use em over ssh
- they’re typically made with keyboard usage in mind, which is often an afterthought in a typical browser based UI
- other GUI options are browser (sandboxes, obvi, not good for lil personal tools), native (not dead simple, compared to TUI/browser/electron), or something like electron (no way lmao)
I don’t seek out TUI’s instead of other solutions. But it’s so dang easy to pop open a new pane and run lazygit. And it makes you look really cool when people walk behind you
> This is unacceptable. Closing an accessibility report because the maintainers haven't touched it in months is not “tidying up”; it is hiding evidence. It effectively says that if a bug is ignored long enough, it ceases to exist.
Another perspective from a project maintainer’s point of view:
The people who own and maintain the project get to decide what the status Open and Closed means in the context of a ticket. Users do not necessarily have to agree.
For example, a project maintainer may choose to assign to a status of Open the meaning “this is untriaged or we’re actively working on it”, and Closed could mean “we have looked at this ticket and determined that no team member is going to work on it right now.” In other words, Closed does not have to mean “rejected and this decision is final” but can mean “it’s not something we’re currently working on.” These semantics might not be intuitive for everyone but can be justifiable if they help the project members organize their workload.
I'd agree with this assessment. Moreover, if developers were to stick with the eminently satisfactory CUA (IBM's Common User Access) interface standard and further regularize that then things would be much easier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
If developers want to experiment with various UI configs then let them but keep a CUA in the background that can be called upon by machines and humans alike. (Unfortunately, ergonomics has never been a strong point for developers.)
...but without the web's accessibility options, without good text editing, with very basic customisation options, requiring trusted compute instead of working in a sandbox...
They're a long way from web apps, far worse on most axes.
Back in the 90s when most SAP systems switched from AS/400 terminals to Windows NT, people reported massive losses in productivity.
I've never worked on SAP, my mother did. And basically, she went from a fully tabular, function-key based oriented workflow, to holding a mouse, moving around and clicking a lot (tabbing and F keys were lost for many functions).
She showed me how she could go from ESC ESC F4 F3 TAB TAB and she was across the whole system a super speed. And this was a terminal, not the actual system!
The short of the story is this
Windows based application work best for discoverability and new users
Terminal based applications work best for faster, memory based navigation and power users.
That's a problem with the specific GUI, not GUI as a concept. Good GUI frameworks should be built for predictability and keyboard-driven fast paths, and have this included by default so you don't have to make these decisions for each app.
In fact, all successful applications for professionals/power users are built with fast paths in mind. Even Microsoft's ribbon which gets a lot of hate for some reason is an example of that, it's keyboard-driven, customizable, and discoverable at the same time.
In fact, just about everything in Windows (not apps, since those can be created by 3rd party developers who may or may not care, but the OS) can be operated by keyboard: login, start menu, settings, even ancient tools like Event Viewer.
Except, strangely, for setup - if you don’t load your laptop’s touchpad/trackpad driver during the early select a partition screen, you seem to get stuck on later screens like when you are required to connect to WiFi.
There is zero reason this capability couldn't have been preserved in the GUI version. It's a common UX design failure mode when people who don't use and never have used the system are told to design the next version of it, but GUI or TUI has little to do with it. GUI just relaxes constraints (which makes shooting UX in the foot easier!)
Kind of, but one benefit of TUIs is text buffering. Part of the reason you were able to go lightning fast in those old TUIs is your inputs would be buffered and then replayed when the application become responsive. Inputs weren't dropped, so even if you were moving faster than the application could keep up (or the network) it would still function predictably.
This was mostly lost in web applications and most desktop applications. Inputs are dropped and lost during processes, page refresh or navigation. It means that while these applications can sometimes be used with a keyboard, they can't be used reliably or predictably. The same inputs would have different effects based on the time of day or network load.
It is also almost always less used and less discoverable. To most people using the keyboard in a GUI does not come naturally. It is also an extra effort for developers.
I don't think the issue is using declarative UI frameworks, it's that the rendering engines these frameworks are outputting to are not taking accessibility into account.
Totally. I had a colleague who was a pretty awesome programmer and was completely blind. When I first met him, he was working on a braille 3270 terminal. Those IBM terminals were capable of all sorts of stuff.
>The mythical, it's text, so it's accessible. There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible.
Nope, nobody believes that. Devs say that for text documents which is somethig else entirely -- and, with provisions, for terminal single command apps (like grep, cut, ls, and so on). Nobody said it for TUIs.
TUI will be rediscovered without the window shit. Few people realise it yet, it it’s g. be sprite based as in c64 consoles. Perhaps someone is already doing it somewhere.
Windows and panes… are free to go. The calming environment of text, which as of 2026 is still integral part of humanity’s cultural dna, and is super underexplored in this medium.
I would say the cognitive agression of modern web is more of a nightmare really in the very psychedelic sense of it with all the imagery and video and ads completely devoid of context.
> The real problem is that pretty much the whole stack has a terrible AX story.
> First, most GPU-rendered terminal emulators don't engage in system-provided accessibility APIs AT ALL. Because text is GPU-rendered, AX tooling can't "read" it, it just shows up as an image. This applies to Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm. My own terminal Ghostty is AX-readable (on macOS), and so are others like iTerm2 and Terminal.app (which admittedly do it better than me, we have gaps to fill).
> Second, there are no terminal sequences or initiatives at all for TUIs to communicate AX information to the emulator, so the emulator itself can't do much more than display a blob of text to AX tooling. We need the equivalent of ARIA-style annotations but for terminal cells, runs, and regions. No such initiative exists. Even if TUIs do great things with the cursor, this is going to bite a lot of use cases.
> As an example of combining the above, I've been working on something with Ghostty where we integrate semantic prompt (OSC133) and AX APIs so that we can present each shell prompt, input, and command as structurally significant to AX tooling (rather than simply a text box where the cursor is somewhere else). This shows the importance of the relationship between terminal specs (OSC133), TUIs (which must emit OSC133), and terminal emulators (which must both understand OSC133 AND communicate it to AX APIs).
> The whole stack is rotten. And no one is earnestly trying to fix it (including me, I have limited time and I do my best but this is a WHOLE TOPIC that requires a huge amount of time and politicking the ecosystem and I don't have it, sorry).
Bonus: a simultaneously awesome and horrible reality is that AI is really helping to improve AX here. A lot of AI tooling uses/abuses AX APIs to make things happen. How is OpenAI reading your list of windows, typing into them, etc? Accessibility frameworks! So a lot more apps are taking AX integration a lot more seriously since its table stacks for AI using it... Sad it requires that but the glass half full is more software is doing that.
>> AX originated in reference to UX (User Experience) and stands for Accessibility Experience. AX is also sometimes used as a synonym for accessibility.
There is no cross platform standard that accomplishes the goals that authors turn to TUIs to solve. There is no widely distributed remotely accessible interface that pops up GUI windows from a shell context that works everywhere.
We should make a terminal accessibility testing interposer (screen/tmux/ascinema style) that collapses all horizontal whitespace to a single space character, disables all color, doesn't allow hardware cursor hiding, slows down to teletype speeds, and forces all output to the end of the buffer unless echoing a typed character. This would be pretty indicative of the experience a screen reader user gets (and I say this as a screen reader user). You'd get some false positives; that tool would be problematic with some patterns which do actually work though.
If your TUI works in conditions like these, or can at least be accessibly configured to do so, you're pretty much done accessibility-wise.
There are some quick wins to be made here; disabling spinners, gratuitous animations and status lines, moving the hardware cursor as you navigate through menu options, even if there's a color or emoji-based selection indicator present, avoiding unnecessary re-renders (don't redraw the whole prompt if you're just echoing a single character, I'm looking at you, Python 3.13+), sorting line segments by importance (timestamps should go at the end, messages at the beginning), that sort of thing.
The real fix would involve an aria-style protocol that lets you actually communicate semantics to a screen reader, but that would require buy-in from TUIs, TUI libraries, terminal emulators, operating systems and screen readers, so it will never happen.
Are there any recommendations for testing accessibility for TUI applications? The article mentions speakup, but as far as I understand, you need a hardware synthesizer to use that. Is it also possible to use orca?
The hacker aesthetics of TUIs, especially around coding agents, is undeniable and the fact that you can mostly run them on any shell (even remote) is neat.
But the UX? If you the goal is not to read a single line of the code churned by these agents, and perhaps that is the point, then they are fine - type the prompt and cross your fingers.
Anything else that requires reading and changing needs an IDE of sorts. I am not saying you cannot have your workflow works with TUIs - plenty of people do. It is just not as good and flexible as full desktop applications.
Emacs is a seemingly [0] excellent compromise between modern TUIs and accessibility since it keeps the text-centric paradigm but allows for much cleaner accessibility. [1]
[0]: I do not need any accessibility features myself.
I'm sure there's a proposal for this somewhere, but I've always wondered if it wouldn't be most viable to just have a separate "reader mode" that replaces all the TUI elements with some sort of templated descriptive string of text, something like "Page one. Foo entry. ' bar'"
Seems a lot more viable than trying to get new standard escape codes and outputting those along with visual content that may be flickering erratically. Also probably gets too complex faster than those proposals with more intricate UIs, but IMO it's really hard to defend TUIs for anything but relatively simple programs as an in-between a CLI and a native application.
> I'm sure there's a proposal for this somewhere, but I've always wondered if it wouldn't be most viable to just have a separate "reader mode" that replaces all the TUI elements with some sort of templated descriptive string of text, something like "Page one. Foo entry. ' bar'"
We have a term for that, it's called a CLI. For example, ed and ex are the historical CLI counterparts to vi.
I suppose that would just be an interactive CLI. Usually I think of them as one-and-done invocations like sed. It's definitely not an ideal mode as evidenced by the current popularity of vim over ed, but it's better than a program being unusable.
That's just the kind of thing you get when you shove something that's native to web browsers into a terminal. Which is what web devs are constantly trying to do in their quest to use their favorite framework and language everywhere. It's the nightmare concept of Electron everything now encroaching on the text-dominant space.
Aside from screen readers are the input methods and hotkeys those are often not consistent or unchangeable in modern tools. However I guess that is not only applicable to TUIs. For example ctrl+arrow to jump over words is not very consistent in all text fields which is a problem for accessibility also.
A single screen with no distractions really helps me focus. That said, dark terminal bg (which i like) kinda sucks for astigmatism (but that’s not unique to TUIs).
I have been saying that since vim and emac . Vim and emac are good because their keyboard driven input system, not because of TUI. Emac gui is proof of that, vim have none properly
As I said before [0], the same web developers that are the ones that ruined the web are now bringing their Java/Typescript, React mess into terminals where it is not needed.
React is software development cancer and it just entered metastasis. It can't be cured anymore, it will spread throughut the entire stack and kill it from the inside. We already have it on the web, on mobile, on Windows 11 and, now, it's coming for the terminal emulator.
For accesibility edbrowse https://github.com/cmb/edbrowse and anything CLI shines such as SIC + Bitlbee to talk with chat platforms, and maybe pjsua for SIP. These can be combined wth yasr (terminal reader)+speech-dispatcher as a TTS.
I'm slowly working on this, trying to figure out what works as I add accessibility to TUIs. Having better structured information on screen feels so so so compelling to me.
I wish the terminal-wg was more active. There's a bunch of weird odd OSC's folks have tried to make for enhancing structure of the terminal, for various ways to emit more layout-coupled semantic info. Accessibility APIs are great but in most forms a huge chunk of their capabilities feel pretty disconnected from the actual drawing on the screen, are somewhat a parallel construct to what's on screen. Using OSC to layer in more information about what is being drawn feels righter.
But in general feels like, for all the TUI interest, not many folks are about and working together to actually figure out how to advance the terminal itself.
I am not sure it is helpful to shoehorn terminals into being a second web. The terminal's strength is its simplicity.
For example, I really dislike mouse support in TUIs. 100% of the times I used the mouse on a TUI, I wanted to copy a piece of text. If the TUI hijacks the mouse and does something different with it (e.g. vim switching into visual mode) that is just annoying.
Of course a11y is important. But it barely works on the web and we won't get perfect semantics on the terminal without a lot of work. I say the better option is to strip down the experience to the parts that work well.
I agree that accidental mouse actions in a TTY are horrible, but generally speaking if you hold shift when clicking and dragging, it will work at the terminal emulater layer instead of sending the clicks to the program in the terminal. I have been shift-clicking like this for years. More because I'm generally in tmux than anything else. If I click and drag without shift I think tmux intercepts it usually.
TL;DR: Use the terminal cursor to indicate focus. Hide it if it bothered you, but place it where the action is. Never use something like just background color to emulate a cursor. Use the real thing.
mc adheres to NC standard, so you already have an extremely accessible system. The whole UI knowledge can be transferred easily among mc, TotalCmd, or NC from 1988 or whatever. Not the case with most TUIs. I had to use aptitude and git's text mode merge tool recently, and both had terrible accessibility, not to mention entirely different designs too. I'm sure I'd get good at them once I read their manual but they were extremely non-intuitive and hard to explore.
> The reality is different. Most modern Text User Interfaces (TUIs) are often more hostile to accessibility than poorly coded graphical interfaces.
The Claude Code rendering UI is the first place where I realized the TUI is more like a DOS or Borland UI system rather than a command line interface.
I was poking about CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 setting when I realized what exactly this TUI is, it is layers of stuff showing up on top of each other with terminal codes.
Ended up reading the Ink Terminal implementation of React
https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink
Fascinating how it ends up looking Wordperfect or Wordstar from the past instead of pixel based graphics.
The usability for a vision impaired user is about the same, though I remember braille pads for DOS tools (80x25) which work better than all the screen readers which came later.
I tried everything to customize the colors of some elements in CC’s TUI, like the dispatched prompt bg/fg, and found it impossible.
A lot of issues that surface for people with colorblindness or adjacent sight issues also arise for eInk monitors.
The more you look into these trendy TUIs the worse it gets -- it's like the developers took the accumulation of all the worst practices since the dawn of programming, and wrapped it all into one unwieldy, overweight, under-performant gelatinous blob that threatens to collapse under its own weight.
They’re not terminal UIs.
They’re attempts at pretending to have Windows (etc.) GUIs in a terminal.
Same stuff people made for DOS when Windows wasn’t common or good enough yet.
I’m not surprised they’re a disaster. Or built without understanding the abilities of the terminal they’re running on.
If you don't want people calling these apps TUIs, what would you prefer people call them? And what does the term TUI refer to, if not this?
ASCII art (or ASCII art interface)
Text User Interface.
But what _is_ a "Text User Interface"? Google Images just returns what is being discussed here: "GUIs" that run in some kind of text mode. And to me, that's also what a TUI is.
A more textually oriented environment (like a normal Unix shell) is, in my experience, usually referred to as a CLI: Command Line Interface.
I did find an interesting hybrid in the Pi coding agent: it seems to leverage the normal terminal scrollback, while still enhancing it with things like transient input fields and status lines, so that it can display those without cluttering scrollback.
That's pretty much the distinction. A CLI is stream-oriented, may accept user input from standard in and/or write to standard out with buffered I/O; a TUI is full-screen, interactive (responds immediately to keystrokes), and uses text characters to represent visual elements.
And that’s where my comment came in.
I see TUI as a more general term: a program based in a terminal.
In my mind it does not imply it has to be an ASCII GUI style thing and not just a stream oriented non-interactive program.
>They’re not terminal UIs. They’re attempts at pretending to have Windows (etc.) GUIs in a terminal.
That's what a terminal UI is, and has been since Emacs was a thing.
> They’re not terminal UIs.
Actually, I think that is close to a good name for them: Terminal-based GUIs.
Some are pretty useful, for instance I like lazygit as a simple dashboard/panel for a small repo (or when making small changes to a larger one), some make me wonder what those who made them were smoking!
The less silly ones are handy when you are tinkering with a far away machine and want something a little more interactive than CLI commands and stuff connected by pipes and scripts but don't want to deal with the latency of GUI remoting. Some, though, are so badly thought out that they are slower than using a browser over long-distance X…
There are useful ones. Something like Midnight Commander can be way better than lots of manual copy and move commands. The kernel config one is way nicer than the stream style kernel configuration tool. Some of these newer ones are starting to feel more like “text mode bling” than useful.
My objection to TUI is I don’t think it’s clear enough for what’s happening here. I think you could easily argue that applies to most readline style stream CLI programs.
Would you call a fully 3D UI in VR, not a planar in the VR world but true 3D, a GUI? It is graphical by definition. But if you talked to someone about a GUI that’s not what they’d think you’re talking about without additional context.
That’s my objection. I think TUI implies way less than what these programs are doing. Yeah it can describe them but I don’t think it should be the word for them.
Real UNIX terminal:
https://youtu.be/Pr1XXvSaVUQ
Also terminal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gUd8yVZ2kA
Terminal:
https://youtu.be/frMwsDTjmAs?t=493
the first and second are graphics terminals which is muddling up the definition. of course they were called terminals back then until we decided to make a distinction. what they are called is not the point. the point is the distinction. for today's discussion terminal means text without graphics, as shown in the third video.
the real question is why are we still using text terminals?
the short answer is that on remote connections graphics is still a performance issue. in fact the popular solution to making remote graphics performant is webbrowsers. they are the graphical terminals of today.
if i want to build a graphical interface to a remote service, then i build a webinterface.
locally, the answer is historical tools, and that text interfaces are easier to develop and still more efficient to use. but not easier. especially commandline tools without an actual visual interface.
i just had this situation. the dolphin filemanager has a feature to add tags and comments to files. the interface is very clunky. but there is a commandline that lets me set those tags and comments which is much more efficient once you learned how to use that command.
As for the third example, note that the programs discussed here (arguably TUI) are unlikely to work on this type of terminal. Unless the program has a built-in mode that allows it to run in true command-line mode (arguably CLI). Just like vi/ex.
Of course, these were just examples to show that a computer terminal didn’t have to - and doesn’t have to - be like a VT100 or similar. And I realize that nowadays, when we hear the word "terminal," we tend to think of something like a VT100. Especially since the Linux (kernel) includes emulation for something like that.
However, historically, the first devices to be called computer terminals (and to enable interactive operation) were typewriters and teletypes. That is why one of the names given to newer CRT terminals was "glass teletypes." To distinguish these terminals from their predecessors, they were also referred as video terminals (VT) or video display units (VDU) etc.
Note that in addition to built-in VT102/VT220 emulation, xterm also includes built-in Tektronix 4014 emulation, which, to use your terminology, is a graphics terminal.
But on the topic, IMHO those "text terminals" represent the lowest common denominator, and using them as a user interface causes the least friction compared to true GUIs. For example, after booting Linux, I can basically start using those TUI programs right away without having to install or configure a graphical environment (X11 or Wayland). Remote computing also causes less friction and can essentially be used out of the box.
And TUI programs, like GUI programs, also make it easier and faster to explore compared to programs that run exclusively in CLI mode.
Personally I regret that Plan9-style computing and Oberon/ACME user interfaces didn’t become mainstream...
Tektronix 4014 emulation
i have in more than 30 years of using X11 never once seen an application that would actually use that tektronix emulation. so i am absolutely clueless in what it can do and how it works. i'd really love to see that and especially learn how it works remotely. apparently telnet has support for it.
> the short answer is that on remote connections graphics is still a performance issue
Wrong answer. Performant remote graphics is a solved problem (streaming video services like Netflix and online graphics-heavy games like Fortnite wouldn't exist otherwise).
Text terminals still exist because text is - currently - the most flexible and powerful method to provide commands, simple to complex. In a GUI you're usually using a mouse/touchpad/etc to navigate menus, click buttons, etc. And the more flexible the app and complex the ask, the more noisy or tedious the GUI will be. I'm unsure if it's still a thing today, but I remember when I was a Windows user and had to click through multiple windows selecting various options to get a regular app installed.
Meanwhile with a CLI, you type in a command with arguments and options, and everything remains relatively very clean and visible regardless of how complex the ask. Like installing something via CLI is maybe 5 elements on average.
streaming video services and Fortnite
those are not remote graphics applications. streaming is one way, and on slow connections it still fails. fortnite is local graphics. like a webbrowser. i already mentioned that. by remote graphics i mean a GUI application that runs 100% on a remote machine, and displays the output locally. like streaming, it depends on a fast connection. unlike streaming the fast connection needs to go both ways and it needs low latency (streaming doesn't need low latency, it just needs bandwidth.
your other example is similar to mine. but, in my opinion there is no reason why we couldn't have better graphical visualization of the commands we type. the browser model seems to be the right approach. local graphics working with remote data structures.
> streaming is one way
But has to be reasonably performant for a decent experience.
> fortnite is local graphics
And commands have to be sent to the server with minimum latency.
Bringing the capabilities of streaming and online gaming together means VNC is a non-issue, as the 2 have far more stringent requirements than the latter. A VNC connection is primarily streaming small diffs for the majority of a session (only occasionally does the full screen need to be sent) and input commands which aren't very latency sensitive; there isn't much to it.
> better graphical visualization of the commands we type
It's possible, but not necessary, and is counterproductive when it harms accessibility, which it often does. The browser is the worse thing out there IMO, because web devs are pushing JavaScript everywhere and hurting the experience for many. Things are supposed to function well for the user, but the focus nowadays is on shoving meaningless animations into things that should just be simple text, and ads into everything, which inevitably leads to far more noise rather than function.
A shell is the environmental manager, the terminal is the display device, and the window is the container. Add in tabs, web panes and sticky notes + make it all agentic, you get Hyperia: https://hyperia.nuts.services
I use ghostty and tmux, that makes it really nice to be in th terminal and have access to good TUIs. I use neovim and k9s mostly and those are such amazinng tools, AI stuff sure but that’s because I don’t really have any other choice. I also use lazygit lately but that’s mostly to get familiar and to have a nicer view of commit history than ’git log —graph’. Also I hate electron apps so well made TUIs are a step up compared to running a web browser for one app.
I've always been a bit mystified by the popularity of TUIs. To me, the power of the terminal is the streaming model. Composible utilities is something that is much less common in GUIs.
I get it that maybe the constraints of terminals force design of TUIs to be more focused on the purpose of the tool than polish, but it's not that compelling of a point to me.
For some basic stuff like vim it works fine. But for almost everything else I'd rather a regular CLI tool or a web interface. I suspect a lot of the popularity comes from people who want to feel like a hacker using 10 terminal windows, but actually want a GUI like experience.
For me, TUIs compensate for the fact that I can't get good remote GUI rendering on Linux. Yes, X11 tunneling exists, but the experience has always been abysmal for me for anything not hosted on a machine that sits on the same LAN as the client. For Wayland I don't even know if such a thing is possible since I don't think the architecture supports it.
But the terminal is just fundamentally the wrong basic abstraction on which to build a structured GUI, it just happens to require few enough bits to be sent over the wire that it actually works reasonably well over SSH as opposed to pushing graphics.
> For Wayland I don't even know if such a thing is possible since I don't think the architecture supports it.
Not only forwarding is trivial with Wayland, it also tends to provide better experience than X11 does.
I have never tried it until now, and I hadn't looked into it. But I just tried `waypipe ssh` to a remote server I have for doing asynchronous Claude work in VMs, and it actually works pretty great! Maybe I'll switch to that for my emacs/magit setup, the lack of clipboard integration when running emacs in a terminal over ssh is enough of an argument for me.
Edit: yikes, pressing M-w caused emacs-pgtk to crash with a Wayland protocol error, so it isn't trivial and requires some configuring I guess.
Edit 2: Apparently I have to install wl-clipboard and write a bunch of emacs lisp to work around this. I don't think I have the patience for that, and I fear that such problems will be even harder to solve for applications which are not as flexible and programmable as emacs. So far I'll conclude that remote Wayland is not ready and stick to TUI.
Edit 3: No, the problem is probably mismatched waypipe versions on client and server. Still not fun.
> Yes, X11 tunneling exists, but the experience has always been abysmal for me for anything not hosted on a machine that sits on the same LAN as the client.
I have used X11 tunnelling to machines on the other side of Europe and it was OK. I did prefer ssh for responsiveness. What happened to NX? What about other remote desktops?
Obviously people want GUIs. That's why TUIs should be compared to GUIs, not to CLIs. TUIs are nice since you get a lot of the benefits of a GUI, without having to leave the context of the terminal.
I feel like the better solution here (than trying to shoehorn a GUI into an interface meant for text) is to make terminal windows graphically-aware, like how things work in Plan 9.
At that point what you want is just a tiling window manager rather than a terminal that supports GUIs.
I already do use tiling window managers and they don't really accomplish the “if you launch a graphical app in a terminal window it takes over that terminal window” flow. Closest I've found is Niri's support for tabbed windows, but even that's just sticking the graphical app window on top of the terminal window instead of the terminal window itself becoming the app window.
Depends, I'm building a markdown down editor that just previews in the web ui. However, I can use the web ui to do tasks like uploading files, view git commits etc. Different interfaces for different purposes. The CLI gives me focused mode, and then visual stuff that steal my time goes in the web
I dunno, pre-LLM TUI's at least tended to be okay, and keyboard navigation was a first class citizen. Besides, if you were using a TUI instead of a GUI then you basically always ended up saving memory/battery life, and TUI programs are generally more portable than trying to run some ancient GUI program.
I typically prefer CLI myself but having a TUI to manage torrents for instance was much more ergonomic.
A lot of the complaints in this thread seem like they're aimed more at recent vibecoded UIs than the concept of a TUI.
Like, okay, they are a big step back with accessibility, but they're flickering garbage because they were vibecoded in a weekend and the TS or Python library they're built on was similarly forced upon this world.
For almost every tui, a webui works better imo. Most torrent clients offer a web management ui and it's always going to be easier and more feature filled using a platform that was actually designed for it rather than hacking a gui in to the terminal.
Accessibility can also be much better in a web UI because the markup is more rigorously defined.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Accessibil...
Well, "better" is relative. Web UIs definitely have the advantage you are mentioning. However, they are also much slower to use, so it is a tradeoff.
I am blind and do rely on accessiblity. But I would choose a TUI over a Web UI every day simply because the web is slow as hell. Feels like running away from a "monster" in a dream. You have rich details, but you are being drowned in unnecessary verbosity and an inherently slow stack of tools working together.
The web might be accessible, but it is barely useable in practice.
That's interesting. Thanks for sharing.
I'm curious which screen reader you're using and what can be configured to fix that experience.
Its more or less the same with every screen reader and browser I know. If there was a simple fix for this inherent issue, I wouldn't have to talk about it. You might get a bit of stuff out of the way if you configure less verbosity of the screen reader, but it doesn't really help with slow interactions. Problems include:
* Virtual buffer: In most systems, the DOM is rendered to a "virtual buffer" and the screen reader lets you navigate that, because cursor (caret) support was on the map for accessibility, but was never really sufficiently implemented on the browser side. So screen readers had to solve it in a separate step.
* Using the keyboard to do screen reading and navigation on a site conflicts with keyboard shortcuts from that site. So most screen reader have two modes: You switch between entering text in a field and navigating/reading the site. Its basically like vi insert mode, but less simple.
Those are the major issues from my POV. The rest of the slowness likely comes from having to go through the accessibility API of your OS.
Vim is special because 99% of what we do is editing text, and it is the text editor—the importance of that task overcomes the poor discoverability of a TUI. Most other programs should be CLI, so they can fit in the conventional command line toolbox.
This. A lot of folks picked it up for that reason when they were young and now are terminal-all-the-things out of sheer inertia.
For the Claude Code / OpenCode / Crush / etc new wave TUIs, it's not about composability or text streaming. It's basically a combination of a few tailwinds:
1. There's already a large-ish community of engineers who live in the terminal e.g. Vim/Neovim/tmux/zellij/etc users. Lots of engineering tasks are accomplished by running scripts in a terminal, so it makes sense for some people to just move as much of their work there as possible. This means there's a set of users you can address with dev tools that run in a terminal.
2. Cross-platform distribution among the platforms most of those people care about — macOS and Linux — is largely a solved problem via package managers. Distributing cross-platform native apps is fragmented at best.
3. Building modern TUIs has become a lot easier thanks to the demand+distribution wins above: there's a lot of appetite for building blocks, and so lots of good options have flourished like Ink for React, Bubble Tea for Go, etc.
4. General developer distaste for the most straightforward analogue to all of this for desktop GUIs: Electron. Deservedly or not it's associated with slow, bloated applications. And if you don't use Electron, doing cross-platform anything is going to be a much harder problem than just pushing out a quick TUI app.
Eventually successful products seem to eventually jump the gap, like Claude Code eventually spawning Claude Cowork and OpenCode adding OpenCode Web. But it's easier and faster to test product market fit for dev tools with a TUI. And plenty of your users will stay there, even after you launch something else.
You can have more lightweight Web UIs if you just open a browser window instead of bundling the browser with your app as Electron does.
While I agree in principle (slack works just fine as a firefox tab, thank you very much), if the application needs filesystem access, it's not going to be viable.
Is that not a partly solved problem? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
Doesn't Tauri fix this?
These were using 66GB compared to what, few KB/MB In NCurses? I can run Nethack/Slashem under a 30 yeard of computer. React it's a joke, and there are ports of Ncurses to any OS.
Totally out of fashion today but think of TN3270. Rather than "streaming" they were forms based and heavily keyboard driven. This could easily be mimicked by a GUI but keyboard shortcuts has become an afterthought.
I still today meet users missing those old workflows. But they express it as "old text interface" aka TUI. If you listen to them you realize they mean blazing fast and shortcut driven. When you work with data entry you care about speed - not animations.
Any beginner likes eye candy. The veteran has stopped caring.
1) TUIs work over ssh without any extra steps.
2) Constraints imposed by the terminal make all the apps look and work approximately the same - in the outside world the standards developed for UX are ignored as a matter of routine just because they can be. TUIs are in an optimum of least surprise, so to speak.
The command line shell has that benefit of piping text between programs. TUIs are runnable from the command line shell. -- So you can get many of the benefits of a GUI (e.g. discoverability) while sticking close to the terminal where you're doing things.
If you're going to "run command, edit command, run command", performing the edits from the terminal you're running the commands in seems reasonable/intuitive. (In contrast, for tools like VSCode, I think it's more common for terminals to take up a fraction of the screen space rather than switching it to full screen. And then developers will say they need a huge monitor).
It also seems to be that keyboard-driven programs are more commonly TUI than GUI. e.g. magit or lazygit. Or lazydocker. Or k9s.
I like them because they’re easy to run in a container / sandbox.
>I've always been a bit mystified by the popularity of TUIs. To me, the power of the terminal is the streaming model.
Ever used Emacs? Or Vim? Or Mutt? Or Borland's old IDEs?
The power of the terminal is also in ubiquitness, trivial connection to a remote system, and lack of mountains of GUI cruft, that a TUI app can as well have.
I've used Vim plenty for the past 30 years. I don't prefer it to GUI text editors.
Many of us however do.
To me, the power of TUIs lies in a few places:
* Lower resource load * Less reliance on a mouse * Related: key bindings for more activities that fit my vi muscle memory * Deeper organization.
Thanks to TUI tools I've been able to roll my own IDE that's invisible when I need it to be (thanks guake & yakuake) and organized by project and tab (thanks zellij). For the mixed role I'm in that works perfectly.
I don't think anybody would look at what I have and call it polished though.
For me it’s mostly - the convenience of being in the terminal, where I live
- you can use em over ssh
- they’re typically made with keyboard usage in mind, which is often an afterthought in a typical browser based UI
- other GUI options are browser (sandboxes, obvi, not good for lil personal tools), native (not dead simple, compared to TUI/browser/electron), or something like electron (no way lmao)
I don’t seek out TUI’s instead of other solutions. But it’s so dang easy to pop open a new pane and run lazygit. And it makes you look really cool when people walk behind you
My experience as a developer (with a preference for simplicity):
- CLI by default
- if I need a GUI, but no access to the local system: web
- if I need a (restricted) GUI with access to the local system: TUI
- else: either start a local web server, or, if nothing else works, go for a GUI toolkit
They are very useful when working on remote servers, VMs and containers. Much much more convenient and robust than, say, X forwarding.
> This is unacceptable. Closing an accessibility report because the maintainers haven't touched it in months is not “tidying up”; it is hiding evidence. It effectively says that if a bug is ignored long enough, it ceases to exist.
Another perspective from a project maintainer’s point of view:
The people who own and maintain the project get to decide what the status Open and Closed means in the context of a ticket. Users do not necessarily have to agree.
For example, a project maintainer may choose to assign to a status of Open the meaning “this is untriaged or we’re actively working on it”, and Closed could mean “we have looked at this ticket and determined that no team member is going to work on it right now.” In other words, Closed does not have to mean “rejected and this decision is final” but can mean “it’s not something we’re currently working on.” These semantics might not be intuitive for everyone but can be justifiable if they help the project members organize their workload.
gemini-cli is not some volunteer maintained open source thing.
Google generally try to be good at accessibility and even publish conformance reports for most of their products https://belonging.google/accessibility-conformance-reports/
I'd agree with this assessment. Moreover, if developers were to stick with the eminently satisfactory CUA (IBM's Common User Access) interface standard and further regularize that then things would be much easier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
If developers want to experiment with various UI configs then let them but keep a CUA in the background that can be called upon by machines and humans alike. (Unfortunately, ergonomics has never been a strong point for developers.)
TUIs were supposed to be the simple option. now they're just web apps wearing a terminal costume
...but without the web's accessibility options, without good text editing, with very basic customisation options, requiring trusted compute instead of working in a sandbox...
They're a long way from web apps, far worse on most axes.
This is a well documented issue, TUI vs. windows.
Back in the 90s when most SAP systems switched from AS/400 terminals to Windows NT, people reported massive losses in productivity.
I've never worked on SAP, my mother did. And basically, she went from a fully tabular, function-key based oriented workflow, to holding a mouse, moving around and clicking a lot (tabbing and F keys were lost for many functions).
She showed me how she could go from ESC ESC F4 F3 TAB TAB and she was across the whole system a super speed. And this was a terminal, not the actual system!
The short of the story is this
Windows based application work best for discoverability and new users
Terminal based applications work best for faster, memory based navigation and power users.
That's a problem with the specific GUI, not GUI as a concept. Good GUI frameworks should be built for predictability and keyboard-driven fast paths, and have this included by default so you don't have to make these decisions for each app.
In fact, all successful applications for professionals/power users are built with fast paths in mind. Even Microsoft's ribbon which gets a lot of hate for some reason is an example of that, it's keyboard-driven, customizable, and discoverable at the same time.
In fact, just about everything in Windows (not apps, since those can be created by 3rd party developers who may or may not care, but the OS) can be operated by keyboard: login, start menu, settings, even ancient tools like Event Viewer.
Except, strangely, for setup - if you don’t load your laptop’s touchpad/trackpad driver during the early select a partition screen, you seem to get stuck on later screens like when you are required to connect to WiFi.
There is zero reason this capability couldn't have been preserved in the GUI version. It's a common UX design failure mode when people who don't use and never have used the system are told to design the next version of it, but GUI or TUI has little to do with it. GUI just relaxes constraints (which makes shooting UX in the foot easier!)
Kind of, but one benefit of TUIs is text buffering. Part of the reason you were able to go lightning fast in those old TUIs is your inputs would be buffered and then replayed when the application become responsive. Inputs weren't dropped, so even if you were moving faster than the application could keep up (or the network) it would still function predictably.
This was mostly lost in web applications and most desktop applications. Inputs are dropped and lost during processes, page refresh or navigation. It means that while these applications can sometimes be used with a keyboard, they can't be used reliably or predictably. The same inputs would have different effects based on the time of day or network load.
It is also almost always less used and less discoverable. To most people using the keyboard in a GUI does not come naturally. It is also an extra effort for developers.
I don't think the issue is using declarative UI frameworks, it's that the rendering engines these frameworks are outputting to are not taking accessibility into account.
I think it’s clear from the article declarative UI could be done, with correct implementation and some options to disable noise.
Clearly no one put thought into any of that. It was just “make terminal, but pretty”.
Does a terminal even have any accessibility support tho?
The article mentions several TUI programs that rendering in an accessible way for screen readers.
Totally. I had a colleague who was a pretty awesome programmer and was completely blind. When I first met him, he was working on a braille 3270 terminal. Those IBM terminals were capable of all sorts of stuff.
Yes. Well, for cli yes.
>The mythical, it's text, so it's accessible. There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible.
Nope, nobody believes that. Devs say that for text documents which is somethig else entirely -- and, with provisions, for terminal single command apps (like grep, cut, ls, and so on). Nobody said it for TUIs.
TUI will be rediscovered without the window shit. Few people realise it yet, it it’s g. be sprite based as in c64 consoles. Perhaps someone is already doing it somewhere.
Windows and panes… are free to go. The calming environment of text, which as of 2026 is still integral part of humanity’s cultural dna, and is super underexplored in this medium.
I would say the cognitive agression of modern web is more of a nightmare really in the very psychedelic sense of it with all the imagery and video and ads completely devoid of context.
Mitchell Hashimoto has a great response on lobste.rs https://lobste.rs/s/ifbdw1/text_mode_lie_why_modern_tuis_are...
> It isn't fair to blame TUIs.
> The real problem is that pretty much the whole stack has a terrible AX story.
> First, most GPU-rendered terminal emulators don't engage in system-provided accessibility APIs AT ALL. Because text is GPU-rendered, AX tooling can't "read" it, it just shows up as an image. This applies to Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm. My own terminal Ghostty is AX-readable (on macOS), and so are others like iTerm2 and Terminal.app (which admittedly do it better than me, we have gaps to fill).
> Second, there are no terminal sequences or initiatives at all for TUIs to communicate AX information to the emulator, so the emulator itself can't do much more than display a blob of text to AX tooling. We need the equivalent of ARIA-style annotations but for terminal cells, runs, and regions. No such initiative exists. Even if TUIs do great things with the cursor, this is going to bite a lot of use cases.
> As an example of combining the above, I've been working on something with Ghostty where we integrate semantic prompt (OSC133) and AX APIs so that we can present each shell prompt, input, and command as structurally significant to AX tooling (rather than simply a text box where the cursor is somewhere else). This shows the importance of the relationship between terminal specs (OSC133), TUIs (which must emit OSC133), and terminal emulators (which must both understand OSC133 AND communicate it to AX APIs).
> The whole stack is rotten. And no one is earnestly trying to fix it (including me, I have limited time and I do my best but this is a WHOLE TOPIC that requires a huge amount of time and politicking the ecosystem and I don't have it, sorry).
Bonus: a simultaneously awesome and horrible reality is that AI is really helping to improve AX here. A lot of AI tooling uses/abuses AX APIs to make things happen. How is OpenAI reading your list of windows, typing into them, etc? Accessibility frameworks! So a lot more apps are taking AX integration a lot more seriously since its table stacks for AI using it... Sad it requires that but the glass half full is more software is doing that.
What is AX in this context?
>> AX originated in reference to UX (User Experience) and stands for Accessibility Experience. AX is also sometimes used as a synonym for accessibility.
The language of accessibility – Staffnet | ETH Zurich https://ethz.ch/staffnet/en/service/communication/digital-ac...
Thanks, never seen that acronym
Accessibility, if I am not mistaken
accessibility. Also regularly seen as a11y.
There is no cross platform standard that accomplishes the goals that authors turn to TUIs to solve. There is no widely distributed remotely accessible interface that pops up GUI windows from a shell context that works everywhere.
Sure there is. It's called HTML.
Yes it's gronky.
But so are VT100 escape codes.
We should make a terminal accessibility testing interposer (screen/tmux/ascinema style) that collapses all horizontal whitespace to a single space character, disables all color, doesn't allow hardware cursor hiding, slows down to teletype speeds, and forces all output to the end of the buffer unless echoing a typed character. This would be pretty indicative of the experience a screen reader user gets (and I say this as a screen reader user). You'd get some false positives; that tool would be problematic with some patterns which do actually work though.
If your TUI works in conditions like these, or can at least be accessibly configured to do so, you're pretty much done accessibility-wise.
There are some quick wins to be made here; disabling spinners, gratuitous animations and status lines, moving the hardware cursor as you navigate through menu options, even if there's a color or emoji-based selection indicator present, avoiding unnecessary re-renders (don't redraw the whole prompt if you're just echoing a single character, I'm looking at you, Python 3.13+), sorting line segments by importance (timestamps should go at the end, messages at the beginning), that sort of thing.
The real fix would involve an aria-style protocol that lets you actually communicate semantics to a screen reader, but that would require buy-in from TUIs, TUI libraries, terminal emulators, operating systems and screen readers, so it will never happen.
Are there any recommendations for testing accessibility for TUI applications? The article mentions speakup, but as far as I understand, you need a hardware synthesizer to use that. Is it also possible to use orca?
The hacker aesthetics of TUIs, especially around coding agents, is undeniable and the fact that you can mostly run them on any shell (even remote) is neat.
But the UX? If you the goal is not to read a single line of the code churned by these agents, and perhaps that is the point, then they are fine - type the prompt and cross your fingers.
Anything else that requires reading and changing needs an IDE of sorts. I am not saying you cannot have your workflow works with TUIs - plenty of people do. It is just not as good and flexible as full desktop applications.
Emacs is a seemingly [0] excellent compromise between modern TUIs and accessibility since it keeps the text-centric paradigm but allows for much cleaner accessibility. [1]
[0]: I do not need any accessibility features myself.
[1]: https://diesenbacher.net/blog/entries/speaking-emacs.html
I wouldn't have assumed a TUI is accessible just because it's on the terminal. I guess the author encounters people who do.
I am surprised, though, that something like "turning off the cursor" enhances the accessibility.
I'm sure there's a proposal for this somewhere, but I've always wondered if it wouldn't be most viable to just have a separate "reader mode" that replaces all the TUI elements with some sort of templated descriptive string of text, something like "Page one. Foo entry. ' bar'"
Seems a lot more viable than trying to get new standard escape codes and outputting those along with visual content that may be flickering erratically. Also probably gets too complex faster than those proposals with more intricate UIs, but IMO it's really hard to defend TUIs for anything but relatively simple programs as an in-between a CLI and a native application.
> I'm sure there's a proposal for this somewhere, but I've always wondered if it wouldn't be most viable to just have a separate "reader mode" that replaces all the TUI elements with some sort of templated descriptive string of text, something like "Page one. Foo entry. ' bar'"
We have a term for that, it's called a CLI. For example, ed and ex are the historical CLI counterparts to vi.
I suppose that would just be an interactive CLI. Usually I think of them as one-and-done invocations like sed. It's definitely not an ideal mode as evidenced by the current popularity of vim over ed, but it's better than a program being unusable.
claude code would fit this model as the most important point is the prompt. Just make the rest of the interactions be commands.
That's just the kind of thing you get when you shove something that's native to web browsers into a terminal. Which is what web devs are constantly trying to do in their quest to use their favorite framework and language everywhere. It's the nightmare concept of Electron everything now encroaching on the text-dominant space.
Aside from screen readers are the input methods and hotkeys those are often not consistent or unchangeable in modern tools. However I guess that is not only applicable to TUIs. For example ctrl+arrow to jump over words is not very consistent in all text fields which is a problem for accessibility also.
That really depends on disability.
A single screen with no distractions really helps me focus. That said, dark terminal bg (which i like) kinda sucks for astigmatism (but that’s not unique to TUIs).
Hey Claude how do I get around signed binaries and App Store hell created by the likes of Apple and Microsoft?
Maybe that’s why we have them? Tbh I don’t mind them, beats some space inefficient bubbly ui showing virtually no info per screen.
I have been saying that since vim and emac . Vim and emac are good because their keyboard driven input system, not because of TUI. Emac gui is proof of that, vim have none properly
I wonder how Turbo Vision (still the only good TUI framework) does on screen reader accessibility.
I agree with some of the sentiment here, but why is it presented in an AI slop format? It's really a self-defeating message.
"TUI" is for people who cant learn text commands: looks pretty, easy to use, not flexible and not powerful. just use a GUI already.
As I said before [0], the same web developers that are the ones that ruined the web are now bringing their Java/Typescript, React mess into terminals where it is not needed.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47364817
React is software development cancer and it just entered metastasis. It can't be cured anymore, it will spread throughut the entire stack and kill it from the inside. We already have it on the web, on mobile, on Windows 11 and, now, it's coming for the terminal emulator.
What do you think React is?
It's true though. I accidently put a React component in my Postgres schema and all the data was dropped. It really poisoned the whole stack.
You’re a bit late to the game if you think that’s new. That has been a thing for the past 10y or so
7 years later and nothing has changed [0] and just more of the same web slop now fully taking over its next target.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503158
Javascript it's already on some ARM processors as a dedicated instruction.
I hear CC users relying on Braille not being very happy with how CC renders, and uses the cursor...
OTOH, I am also a Braille user and think codex works just fine.
Maybe check the alternatives before declaring an accessibility crisis?
The "T" in "TUI" means "Terminal" not "Text".
For accesibility edbrowse https://github.com/cmb/edbrowse and anything CLI shines such as SIC + Bitlbee to talk with chat platforms, and maybe pjsua for SIP. These can be combined wth yasr (terminal reader)+speech-dispatcher as a TTS.
NCurses can be hooked with ease; IDK about the rest.
I'm slowly working on this, trying to figure out what works as I add accessibility to TUIs. Having better structured information on screen feels so so so compelling to me.
I wish the terminal-wg was more active. There's a bunch of weird odd OSC's folks have tried to make for enhancing structure of the terminal, for various ways to emit more layout-coupled semantic info. Accessibility APIs are great but in most forms a huge chunk of their capabilities feel pretty disconnected from the actual drawing on the screen, are somewhat a parallel construct to what's on screen. Using OSC to layer in more information about what is being drawn feels righter.
Two examples, collapsible regions, semantic prompt regions, https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/... https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/...
But in general feels like, for all the TUI interest, not many folks are about and working together to actually figure out how to advance the terminal itself.
I am not sure it is helpful to shoehorn terminals into being a second web. The terminal's strength is its simplicity.
For example, I really dislike mouse support in TUIs. 100% of the times I used the mouse on a TUI, I wanted to copy a piece of text. If the TUI hijacks the mouse and does something different with it (e.g. vim switching into visual mode) that is just annoying.
Of course a11y is important. But it barely works on the web and we won't get perfect semantics on the terminal without a lot of work. I say the better option is to strip down the experience to the parts that work well.
I agree that accidental mouse actions in a TTY are horrible, but generally speaking if you hold shift when clicking and dragging, it will work at the terminal emulater layer instead of sending the clicks to the program in the terminal. I have been shift-clicking like this for years. More because I'm generally in tmux than anything else. If I click and drag without shift I think tmux intercepts it usually.
> If the TUI hijacks the mouse and does something different with it (e.g. vim switching into visual mode) that is just annoying.
tmux is great for this. Just press Ctrl+[ and the cursor can select whatever text is in the window.
If you want to improve TUI accessibility, there is really one magic trick that gets you almost all the way there: https://blind.guru/blog/2021-06-25-brick.html
TL;DR: Use the terminal cursor to indicate focus. Hide it if it bothered you, but place it where the action is. Never use something like just background color to emulate a cursor. Use the real thing.
I use mc as a file manager. I have no idea what you are talking about.
mc adheres to NC standard, so you already have an extremely accessible system. The whole UI knowledge can be transferred easily among mc, TotalCmd, or NC from 1988 or whatever. Not the case with most TUIs. I had to use aptitude and git's text mode merge tool recently, and both had terrible accessibility, not to mention entirely different designs too. I'm sure I'd get good at them once I read their manual but they were extremely non-intuitive and hard to explore.
admittedly mc is far from being a "modern" TUI
Maybe someone should come up with AI for blind people. TUAIs :-)