TUI vs GUI: Why the Terminal is Making a Massive Comeback

All Notes

Technology

A glowing green terminal screen in a dark room.

The Return to the Roots

In the late 90s, the tech world was obsessed with “The Desktop.” We were desperate to escape the dry, black-and-white world of the command line for the vibrant, clickable world of GUIs. But something strange happened in the last decade. Applications became slower. Desktop apps like Slack, Discord, and VS Code started eating 2GB of RAM just to show a text box (thanks to Electron).

In response, a new generation of power users is fleeing back to the terminal. But they aren’t using the primitive CLI of the 80s; they are using the TUI (Terminal User Interface).

1. What is a TUI? (The Middle Ground)

A TUI is an interface that uses text-based characters (ASCII/Unicode) to draw complex layouts, menus, and interactive widgets inside a standard terminal emulator.

CLI: You type a command, hit enter, and wait. (e.g., git commit -m "...")
GUI: You use a mouse to click buttons and navigate menus. (e.g., GitHub Desktop)
TUI: You use a keyboard to navigate an interactive visual layout. (e.g., LazyGit)

2. Why TUIs Win in 2025

A. Zero-Latency Interaction

In a GUI, there is an abstraction layer between you and the OS. Buttons have to be rendered, hover states calculated, and animations played. In a TUI, the interface is literally just character buffers. The input lag is measured in microseconds, not milliseconds.

B. The Keyboard “Flow State”

The mouse is a bottleneck. Moving your hand from the home-row to the mouse and back takes time and breaks concentration. Professional TUIs are designed to be used entirely with hotkeys (often Vim-inspired). Once you learn them, you move at the speed of thought.

C. Resource Efficiency: The Anti-Electron Movement

A modern TUI like btop or neovim can handle a hundred open files while using less than 100MB of RAM. Compare that to a GUI IDE or a modern web browser, and the performance gap is staggering.

D. SSH/Remote Native

This is the “Killer Feature.” You can SSH into a server in London from your laptop in New York, and run a TUI. It will feel as snappy as if it were running locally. You can’t do that with a GUI over the internet without massive lag and bandwidth usage.

3. The Power User’s Toolkit (2025 Editions)

App	TUI Alternative	Why It’s Better
Task Manager	`btop` / `htop`	Visualize cores and GPU temps in high-def terminal code.
Git Client	`LazyGit`	10x faster staging and branching via keyboard shortcuts.
Text Editor	`Neovim` / `Helix`	Infinite extensibility and zero bloat.
File Manager	`Yazi` / `Ranger`	Preview images and archives inside the terminal.
SQL Client	`pgcli` / `usql`	Auto-completion for SQL without a heavy DB IDE.

4. Building Your First TUI (Go/Python/Rust)

Building TUIs used to be hard (using the ancient ncurses library). Today, modern libraries have made it a joy:

Go: Bubble Tea (by Charm.sh) - The gold standard for beautiful TUIs.
Rust: Ratatui - High-performance, memory-safe TUI engine.
Python: Textual - Allows you to build TUIs using a CSS-like styling system.

Conclusion

The GUI is built for the masses—it is “discoverable” and easy to use. But the TUI is built for the master. It rewards the time you spend learning it with a level of productivity and reliability that “modern” desktop apps simply can’t match. If you want a workflow that feels like it’s actually working for you, it’s time to move back to the terminal.