Charm v2: Major releases for Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles for terminal UIs in Go

45 points by marcoroth a day ago on lobsters | 11 comments

oliverpool | 15 hours ago

This article is mainly marketing stuff.

I found much more interesting the “What’s new”:

carlana | 51 minutes ago

We've updated our import paths to use vanity domains and use our domain to import Go packages.

// Before import tea "github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea/v2"

// After import tea "charm.land/bubbletea/v2"

Everything else stays the same 🙂

This is going to cause problems. They should have moved to v3 so that people trying to run go upgrade from the old address don't get weird bugs about the address not matching.

ghthor | 20 hours ago

Excellent! Time to migrate webtea over for those sweet key up/down messages

BD103 | 16 hours ago

Congrats on the releases! I absolutely adore Charm's fun and flavorful branding. It has so much personality, the home page is like eye candy!

With its cohesion and sharp design, the website definitely contributes to the credibility of the project. It makes me wonder what other open-source projects could benefit from tasteful branding like this. Would it substantially increase adoption from non-technical users?

The only other thing I can think of that somewhat relates to this is when Musescore 4.0 was released. The UI + UX redesign that it experienced in that update was so intense that Musescore became the de-facto standard music notation software at my university. (Especially since Finale kicked the bucket in 2024.)

sigmonsez | 5 hours ago

i honestly find it distracting and don't trust it's quality. Almost as if more effort was put into the design rather than the library or project itself. While I know that's not true after reading up on it, it's not something I look for or expect.

How do people use this type of LLM CLIs for coding? I feel like agentic coding interfaces belong to IDEs as you have to constantly go back and forth between the chat panel and code and you need full IDE functionality (find references, go to definition, diagnostics etc.).

I think if I were to use this I'd have to just split my Sway workspace into two vertical parts, with this and an IDE side by side. Effectively imitating having an embedded agentic coding pane in the IDE.

square_usual | 2 hours ago

you have to constantly go back and forth between the chat panel and code

I basically never do that. My flow is basically:

  1. Work with an agent on a spec
  2. Have an agent execute the spec
  3. Review the code with gitui/neovim/another agent
  4. When satisfied, push and PR

Often, I'm working on a handful of tasks at the same time, so while an agent is chugging away I'm doing this process with another agent on another task. I rarely ever sit next to an agent, look at its code, and then have it work while I read the code it's writing.

I much prefer the TUI experience because I can have a terminal window with agents and a terminal window with neovim and switch between them as I need; I'd rather not have to use a heavy graphical IDE to do so.

ksynwa | 8 hours ago

This has befuddled me too. Off the top of my head I cannot think of a reason why all these harnesses should be terminal based. My hunch is that most developers would be more comfortable in a graphical environment. These tools are already written in Typescript and distributed as a single binary using bun.

carlana | 53 minutes ago

Exe.dev has a web interface to their agents. It's pretty good.

lytedev | 7 hours ago

I think most people who are used to having various tools in their terminal are used to managing them, and more specifically perhaps the UNIX philosophy takes over here, and it lets me kind of have a program for each thing, or each kind of thing that I'm working on. So I really like having the strong separation between my coding agent, and my text editor, and my debugger, and various other tools that are running.

But I also haven't really tried doing the same in an IDE! I'll give it a whirl. Which ones have been successful in your estimate and why?

gcupc | 3 hours ago

This is nice, I guess, but I hate it that TUI libraries are all language-locked these days.