| name | coding-shape-tui |
| description | Category umbrella for building terminal UIs. Charm stack is the default - bubbletea, lipgloss, gum, glow, huh. Fall back to tview/promptui only when a project already commits to them. |
coding-shape-tui
Umbrella for any work that ships a terminal UI as the primary surface.
Triggers
tui, terminal ui, charm, charmbracelet, bubbletea, lipgloss, gum, glow, huh, freeze, vhs, soft-serve, wish, tview, promptui, blessed, ink, textual.
Framework defaults by language
- Go → Charm stack:
bubbletea - TUI framework (Elm architecture).lipgloss - styling (border, padding, color).huh - forms.gum - shell-script prompts/styling (no Go binary needed).glow - markdown render.vhs - terminal recording for demos.
- Python →
textual (Textualize) for full TUIs, rich for output styling without an interactive loop.
- Node/TypeScript →
ink (React-shaped, but acceptable in this niche).
Reach for tview/promptui only when an existing project already commits to them.
Why Charm
Cotton-candy aesthetic, MIT-licensed, very actively maintained, plays nicely with urfave/cli for the imperative-CLI-with-occasional-TUI shape. See kai-tech-prefs (in agentic-os-kai).
Design principles
- TTY-aware. Detect non-interactive mode (pipe, CI) and degrade to plain text. Never wedge a script.
- Keyboard-first. Mouse support is bonus, not load-bearing.
- Quit gracefully. Ctrl+C and
q should always work.
- Color via lipgloss/rich. Never hand-roll ANSI escape codes.
- Width-responsive. Don't assume 80 columns. Test at 40 and 200.
When this skill is active
Designing a TUI, adding an interactive surface to an existing CLI, or styling terminal output beyond plain print.
See also
