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TUIs (Terminal User Interfaces) are experiencing a resurgence as native GUI frameworks on Windows, macOS, and Linux have fragmented or declined in quality. Windows has cycled through MFC, WPF, Silverlight, WinUI, and MAUI without coherent direction. macOS is breaking its own Human Interface Guidelines with recent design decisions. Electron apps fill the gap but lack visual consistency and keyboard-driven workflows. Attempts to start fresh — like Google's Flutter/Fuchsia or Zed's custom GPU renderer — face adoption challenges. TUIs win by being fast, automatable, OS-agnostic, and remotely accessible. The post concludes with a call for developers to take UI theory seriously as a core engineering discipline, not a soft skill.

Why TUIs are back by Alcides Fonseca

<p>TUIs have also one other advantage: they’re significantly harder to clutter due to limited space. If you try it, you’ll end up with an unusable UI 99% of the time. Some will probably try shoving in as much on the screen as possible (and some even succeed), but it’s a lot harder to maintain that “amount to usefulness” ratio when you have 200x80 cells than when you have 1920x1080 or more. 😉</p>


<p>TUIs will remain niche and people are basically reinventing GUIs from first principles as they try to add more and more features to TUIs</p>
