TUI Studio: Visual Terminal UI Design Finally Gets the Figma Treatment

Terminal UIs are everywhere. htop, lazygit, k9s — every tool that makes the command line bearable lives in that text-only world of escape codes and carefully positioned characters. Building them? That's been a different story. Hand-coding layouts, wrestling with positioning, debugging invisible whitespace issues. Not exactly what you'd call designer-friendly.

TUI Studio changes that. It's a visual editor for terminal interfaces — drag components onto a canvas, see live ANSI output, export to actual code. Think Figma, but for applications that live entirely in your terminal.

What Makes This Different

Most TUI frameworks dump you straight into code. "Here's how to create a box. Now figure out how to make it not look terrible." TUI Studio flips that around. You design visually first, with real-time preview of exactly how your interface will render in an actual terminal.

The component library covers the basics you'd expect — buttons, text inputs, tables, progress bars — plus some thoughtful additions like trees, breadcrumbs, and modal dialogs. Twenty-one components total, each with proper property panels for tweaking layout, colors, and behavior.

The layout engine supports three modes: absolute positioning (when you know exactly where something goes), flexbox (for responsive terminal layouts), and CSS Grid (because sometimes you need that level of control). All the layout properties you'd use in web development, adapted for character-cell constraints.

The Export Promise

Here's where TUI Studio gets ambitious: it targets six different TUI frameworks. Design once, generate production code for Ink (TypeScript), BubbleTea (Go), Blessed (JavaScript), Textual (Python), OpenTUI (TypeScript), or Tview (Go). One design, multiple deployment targets.

That's the promise. The reality? Export isn't functional yet. TUI Studio is in alpha, and the developer is upfront about what works and what doesn't. The design environment is solid. Code generation is "actively being worked on."

This is either refreshing honesty or a red flag, depending on how you feel about alpha software.

Hands-On Reality

I grabbed the Mac build and went through the usual dance of convincing macOS that unsigned software isn't inherently evil. (Right-click, "Open anyway" — you know the routine.) The interface loads clean and responsive, with that satisfying drag-and-drop feel you'd expect from a modern design tool.

The live preview is the killer feature. Drop a table component onto the canvas, and you immediately see how it'll render with actual ANSI characters. Change the color theme from Dracula to Solarized, and the preview updates instantly. No compile step, no mental translation between your design tool and the final output.

Component properties are comprehensive without being overwhelming. Select a button, and you get sensible options: text, colors, padding, border styles. Select a table, and you can configure columns, headers, and data display. It feels like the right level of abstraction — detailed enough to be useful, not so granular that you're micromanaging character positions.

The project file format is straightforward JSON, saved as .tui files. Version control friendly, team-shareable, no vendor lock-in. Solid choice.

The Honest Verdict

TUI Studio solves a real problem. Designing terminal interfaces visually instead of through trial-and-error coding is obviously better. The implementation is thoughtful, the interface is clean, and the live preview actually works.

But it's incomplete. The core value proposition — design once, export everywhere — isn't ready. You can design beautiful terminal UIs and save them as JSON. You can't generate the code that makes them functional applications.

That puts TUI Studio in an awkward spot. Too promising to ignore, too unfinished to recommend for real projects. If you're building terminal applications today, you're still hand-coding layouts in your framework of choice.

For the right person — someone prototyping TUI concepts, exploring what's possible, or just tired of guessing what their terminal layouts will look like — TUI Studio is already useful. As a design tool divorced from implementation, it's solid.

The moment code export works reliably, this becomes essential. Visual design tooling for terminal UIs should have existed years ago. TUI Studio is finally building it.

Go Try It

Download the Mac build from tui.studio, fight past the Gatekeeper warnings, and spend twenty minutes dragging components around. Even without code export, you'll understand why this approach makes sense.

Or clone the repo and run it locally:

git clone https://github.com/jalonsogo/tui-studio.git
cd tui-studio
npm install
npm run dev

Open localhost:5173 and start designing. The alpha label is honest — this isn't production-ready. But it's the right direction for terminal UI development.

Compiled by AI. Proofread by caffeine. ☕