man I want to know where their creativity comes from, it's like they've built an entire world with a story... but it's just a (highly regarded) collection of packages
It's intentional design. They picked a strong visual identity early and applied it consistently; the name, the color palette, the retro terminal feel. Every package looks like it belongs to the same family.
Most open source projects never think about this. Charm did from day one.
This has led to a completely overblown design of at least their website. All these cutesy pictures of bubble tea, way too big graphical wrappers, no simple page that is labeled "screenshots", no explanation what "bubbletea" actually is, ... One would think it to be a simple task to mention somewhere that this is a TUI library, where one can see it at the first glance. But apparently not. Instead I am seeing:
Your new coding bestie, now available in your favourite terminal. Your tools, your code, and your workflows, wired into your LLM of choice. This is artificial intelligence made glamourous.
Eh, so something about AI tools? And is "Crush" another tool than "bubbletea"? Why am I seeing something about "Crush" and not about "bubbletea"?
Maybe it's simply not my taste. For a TUI library, I expect serious listings of what it can do, what it supports, what it helps you with. Is it a layer on top of ncurses? Features and use-cases over meaningless authority arguments like "Look who uses this too!".
I also see:
We make the command line glamorous.
I don't want my command line to change! I configured it to be just how I like it. What they mean is, that they make command line applications using their library "glamorous" (whatever that means). I have a suggestion for a better slogan: "Your advanced command line widgets library" or "Library for advanced TUI applications".
I think it's both completely valid to feel this way, and also valid for them to have fun with their design and aesthetic. If you already know what charm does, it makes perfect sense and is cool to see.
From my interactions with younger engineers, this is what "they're looking for". I think we're just used to a different format, so our expectations don't match the reality. Our instincts are different, maybe? Not sure.
Ok but who cares about your finance department, and more importantly, why would your finance department care for a technology choice of the engineering teams? The fucked up thing is your finance department in this scenario, not Charm
In a world of boring corporate "rounded corners are less aggressive" websites and app designs, I really appreciate something that is more out there. Crush is their "opencode"-ish app and is my go to when not using CC or CopilotCLI directly. Sure, it everyone's cup of (bubble) tea but that is kind of the great part, it doesn't have to nor does try to be.
Would be fun to see some data on this and see if it matches or conflicts with your feeling. Probably someone out there with some public sentiment analysis of hn - I wonder if you can pull out snark or cynical sarcasm from something like that.
Bubble tea is a library for handling TUIs using the Elm architecture, often abbreviated TEA: a model type, a message type, an update function that refreshes the model and emits side effects, and a view function that renders the UI given the model state. The article link goes to the releases page, but the top level README of the project has much better info.
Somehow this whole ecosystem of tools always gives me a bad vibe, and I can't quite pinpoint why.
All the demos and videos are applications with lots of stacked pop-ups/modal windows, and things moving around continuously. It all reminds me of what we typically see in computers in TV shows or sci-fi films.
It just looks like a chaotic mess of things, and I get this really strong urge to just stay away from it all.
For me its the fact a large chunk of my terminal experience is over limited bandwidth connections to laggy servers with varying feature support. I appreciate the eye candy and what they have achieved but I don't need it, I just want TUIs to work everywhere with low latency.
It has a “gen-AI” vibe to it, and it’s meant to be playful in an alt/psypop sort of way but it is from no culture in particular. It trips up my brain as a bubbly ad from the marketing department of a dystopian corporation.
Yeah, similar feelings here. I grew up in the BBS world in the 90s, and love a quality TUI experience, but something about this toolset just gives me the ick. I can't keep any of the naming straight; to me it all reads like "combine Chapstick with Cotton Swab inside of Matcha Latte" and my eyes instantly glaze over.
How does this company make money? Is it all just a ZIRP fever dream?
I agree with you about the general vibe being off putting. I’ve been using their libraries for a while now and have to say they are pretty solid though. The terminal components work reliably, and have less UX bugs than the alternatives.
Maybe it's just pattern recognition misfiring, maybe I'm too just used to workhorse software with websites that look stuck in 1999, but everything coming out of that company (Charmbracelet, Inc. according to website footer) feels like it could suddenly get monetized and enshittified next Tuesday morning.
There is also something weird about this entire aesthetics. They all got this 2020s startup vibe of smooth gradients, bisexual lighting, infantile mascots with cartoon or anime inspired styles, vaguely Asian and vaguely feminine. It feels predatory not in the Big Cat with Bloody Mouth way, but in the Cocomelon sensory videos for ages 1 to 3 way. Am I crazy or does anyone else feel similarly?
I would be fine with a chaotic bubbly mess of an outside presentation, if the libraries were more robust and foundational. At the moment the underlying code, when you scratch the surface, have the feel of things thrown together to be replaced at later date.
I bounced off of bubble tea not because of the aesthetics and the unhelpful naming, but because of the programming model: a MVC-architecture cribbed from the Elm language. Why? It completely takes over and rips apart my CLI structure. A CLI is not a DOM or System.Windows.Forms, MVC is scattering around logic and adding indirection layers needlessly.
I am still using huh? and vhs, but their libraries have the feel of looking really good in demo and in the provided examples, but break down quickly when coloring just outside those intended lines.
Thank you. I kept looking at the page trying to figure out WTF it even was, and was unsuccessful. Damn, I wish I had a cane so I could shake it at these devs.
I've been building a coding agent (https://github.com/abrinsmead/cogent) on the previous version of bubble tea for the past few weeks and it has been nice to work with (though honestly I'm not touching much code).
The biggest blocker I have is that I haven't been able to simultaneously support both mouse wheel scrolling and the ability to select text for copy and paste. I understand that this is a limitation of pretty much all terminals, but we have seen it solved in Claude Code. Maybe this new version has a solution.
> Charm had previously raised around $4 million in funding spread across various angel and seed rounds, and now the company is adding a further $6 million to its coffers, with Google’s VC fund Gradient Ventures leading the charge, supported by Cavalry Ventures, Fuel Capital, Firestreak, and a slew of angel backers.
Is is just me or this is the first website with a sensible text size (relative to the lenght of the content) and every other (legacy) sites on the internet has way too small text?
Surprised huh v2 isn't included in this and there's no mention of it in the release announcement at all. Quite a few of my apps mix bubbletea/bubbles and huh in different parts of the app, and while they're typically separate and technically could coexist no problem, it would feel a bit weird. Plus huh is advertised as "can be integrated into a Bubble Tea application"; I'm not using it personally but it's surely used by some users. Anyone from charmbracelet here could comment on the situation?
Maybe it's a generational thing, but if I proposed to my coworkers in 2003 that we should build an app(lication!) with "Go, bubble tea and huh" - I would be laughed out of the room and onto the unemployment line.
My favourite library from these folks is gum (https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum). The basic premise is simple - instead of using hardcoded variables or in addition/instead of using CLI flags, call gum and capture the STDOUT to get the selected input value(s). Great for turning a bash script into a TUI, uses these libraries under the hood.
I find the pattern of showing interactive TUI if required options/flags are omitted much nicer than showing an error/help output.
I love this design language to death. I know a lot of engineers prefer a no-frills, straight to the point readme (as reflected in these comments), and I get that. But I also don't want to live in a world made out of nothing but boxes.
It feels a bit like visiting Fallingwater and complaining that there are no arrows pointing to the bathroom.
Stoked to see this! I’ve been using bubble tea and all its accoutrements on various little hobby projects for the past few years. Love the ergonomics and aesthetics and can’t wait to try out v2!
Theory: terminal apps are closing the agent self-improvement loop because agents can use TUIs more easily than web/desktop/mobile.
Anomaly, which builds OpenCode + OpenTUI), is also doing some really interesting stuff in this space with their custom renderer. And then there's Ink (https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink) which is what Claude Code uses. I also built Ink Web (https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web) to make Ink work in the browser.
You know what's even easier for AI agents to use than TUIs? CLIs.
My experience has been that agents suck at using TUIs, and are good at using CLIs. I would argue that agents are a reason that TUIs might die in favor of CLIs.
I agree, agents struggle with TUIs. I do think this is easy to fix though (here's an interesting approach: https://github.com/remorses/ghostty-opentui). I think agents will have much better luck with TUIs than browsers.
The more interesting scenario IMO is having apps that are both TUIs AND CLIs where the agent uses the CLI but can pause and show the user a TUI for complex tasks where the user needs to input something.
> I think agents will have much better luck with TUIs than browsers.
I’m very skeptical. Why would you think that? TUIs inherently don’t provide programmatically accessible affordances; if they have any affordances at all, they’re purely visual cues that have unstandardized and of varying quality.
Compare that to the DOM in a browser where you’ve got numerous well-understood mechanisms to convey meaning and usability. Semantic HTML and ARIA roles. These things systematically simplify programmatic consumption.
> the terminal is the most powerful way to interface with the operating system.
There's something about the UX here, how we're interfacing in an abstract way directly with the computer, now with agents. I hope we can get some interesting design study insights over the coming months and years.
I don't see a UI replacing the experience we get with TUIs. Also, UIs seem very clunky, in relation to TUIs performance.
This website is a bit too hyperactive for my taste, and I can't imagine how they hope to make enough money from it to satisfy the VCs. But Bubbletea really is a great TUI and it's properly open source - so I'm happy to enjoy it while it lasts.
I'm with you on the Turbo Vision love, though. Honestly, it felt we were getting to such a good place in the early/mid 90s with beautiful, well-thought-out TUIs becoming the norm.
In retrospect, the universality of basic curses/ncurses on Unix/Linux (together with the death of DOS) was a real a step back - trapping us in a local pessimum for far too long. TUIs languished, and most of us moved to a mix of CLIs and GUIs.
(There's an MIT-licensed port of Turbo Vision available now at https://github.com/magiblot/tvision - pity that it's a couple of decades too late!)
I'm so excited about this! And I expect the speed/bandwidth improvements in the new renderer to be very significant.
I spent a while hacking on my own fork of the Bubbletea renderer over the last few months in order to run a game over SSH[1]. It was a ton of work for a niche, simple game (snake) but it dropped bandwidth usage by a factor of 10. The new renderer has to be more general so it might not quite hit that for all applications, but I bet it's not that far off.
I could also see it being an even more significant gain for apps that use a lot of modern colors and styling, since escape sequences there can be very long / heavy weight.
Some of the comments here are annoyed about the website branding but FWIW I think bubbletea and lipgloss (and wish, if you want SSH stuff) are really excellent tools for building "boring" TUIs too.
Yup, very easy to just look at the github url and guess. And now that you've imported it, you can guess how to use it, right?
Yup, start with "tea.Init()". Wait, where'd the "tea" come from? Silly, importing the above package url magically adds "tea" into the current file scope, it's obvious.
Ignoring the snark for a second. It's not because you are unfamiliar with the go toolchain that it's inherently bad, nor does it put you in a good position to give accurate criticism.
- "tea" is an explicit alias that was added to the import statement in the tutorial examples, which you did not reflect in your snippet:
import tea "charm.land/bubbletea/v2"
- The following also just works as you expected, but directly assumed wouldn't work:
import github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea
The only surprise here is that the repository authors decided to change the name of the module between v1 and v2 of the package. The git branch tagged v2 contains a module named 'charm.land/bubbletea', earlier v1 branches are named 'github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea'. That's on them for breaking convention and surprising users, the go toolchain does not factor into, this beyond supporting versioning by naming convention.
I just want a terminal that can also run fully graphical interfaces and that scroll as more lines are typed or a later command outputs text! Next level up from sixels or escape sequences.
i migrated my tui (lazyworktree) to it and it's been absolute pleasure, they finally fixed the isssue where row could not be "lipglossed"/colored as before (like on screenshots here https://chmouel.github.io/lazyworktree/#screenshots)
I posted about this last week [1], but it didn't get any traction. Although I used a link to the release page rather than the blog announcement, so maybe that was why.
ftchd | a day ago
[OP] atkrad | a day ago
zelphirkalt | a day ago
Maybe it's simply not my taste. For a TUI library, I expect serious listings of what it can do, what it supports, what it helps you with. Is it a layer on top of ncurses? Features and use-cases over meaningless authority arguments like "Look who uses this too!".
I also see:
I don't want my command line to change! I configured it to be just how I like it. What they mean is, that they make command line applications using their library "glamorous" (whatever that means). I have a suggestion for a better slogan: "Your advanced command line widgets library" or "Library for advanced TUI applications".Maybe I am nitpicking too much.
slopinthebag | a day ago
tokioyoyo | a day ago
taurath | a day ago
triyambakam | 21 hours ago
jasonjmcghee | a day ago
Honestly amazes me you'd put so much effort into brand and not do copywriting yourself.
reaperducer | a day ago
Awesome for one man bands. Or maybe Panic. But my Finance department is never going to approve that purchase.
thiht | 20 hours ago
reaperducer | 15 hours ago
saratogacx | 22 hours ago
neom | a day ago
joshka | a day ago
- https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea
- https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbles
- https://github.com/charmbracelet/lipgloss
pennomi | a day ago
written-beyond | a day ago
collingreen | 11 hours ago
keyle | a day ago
I've been using tcell, it's been fine... This just looks like fancy TUI without real benefits but wowing the user at first run...
zabzonk | a day ago
yegle | a day ago
Not sure if it's a good comparison (never used both in depth) but think of this a Go version of all the goodies from https://textual.textualize.io/
1-more | 23 hours ago
For a related library in Rust check out Iced: https://book.iced.rs
WhyNotHugo | a day ago
All the demos and videos are applications with lots of stacked pop-ups/modal windows, and things moving around continuously. It all reminds me of what we typically see in computers in TV shows or sci-fi films.
It just looks like a chaotic mess of things, and I get this really strong urge to just stay away from it all.
zipping1549 | a day ago
thiht | 20 hours ago
djfergus | a day ago
gladiatr72 | a day ago
reaperducer | a day ago
Life is weird.
pealco | a day ago
taurath | a day ago
userbinator | 23 hours ago
The general vibe I get is "script kiddies trying too hard".
evanelias | 21 hours ago
How does this company make money? Is it all just a ZIRP fever dream?
catlifeonmars | 20 hours ago
pibaker | 19 hours ago
Maybe it's just pattern recognition misfiring, maybe I'm too just used to workhorse software with websites that look stuck in 1999, but everything coming out of that company (Charmbracelet, Inc. according to website footer) feels like it could suddenly get monetized and enshittified next Tuesday morning.
There is also something weird about this entire aesthetics. They all got this 2020s startup vibe of smooth gradients, bisexual lighting, infantile mascots with cartoon or anime inspired styles, vaguely Asian and vaguely feminine. It feels predatory not in the Big Cat with Bloody Mouth way, but in the Cocomelon sensory videos for ages 1 to 3 way. Am I crazy or does anyone else feel similarly?
spiffotron | 15 hours ago
theshrike79 | 19 hours ago
yvdriess | 18 hours ago
I bounced off of bubble tea not because of the aesthetics and the unhelpful naming, but because of the programming model: a MVC-architecture cribbed from the Elm language. Why? It completely takes over and rips apart my CLI structure. A CLI is not a DOM or System.Windows.Forms, MVC is scattering around logic and adding indirection layers needlessly.
I am still using huh? and vhs, but their libraries have the feel of looking really good in demo and in the provided examples, but break down quickly when coloring just outside those intended lines.
sph | 13 hours ago
lenkite | 10 hours ago
GaggiX | a day ago
AberrantJ | a day ago
allthetime | a day ago
bigstrat2003 | a day ago
jofzar | a day ago
abrinz | a day ago
The biggest blocker I have is that I haven't been able to simultaneously support both mouse wheel scrolling and the ability to select text for copy and paste. I understand that this is a limitation of pretty much all terminals, but we have seen it solved in Claude Code. Maybe this new version has a solution.
mlazos | a day ago
RS-232 | a day ago
lithiumii | a day ago
Sparkle-san | a day ago
wavemode | a day ago
wonger_ | a day ago
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/02/charm-offensive-googles-gr...
> Charm had previously raised around $4 million in funding spread across various angel and seed rounds, and now the company is adding a further $6 million to its coffers, with Google’s VC fund Gradient Ventures leading the charge, supported by Cavalry Ventures, Fuel Capital, Firestreak, and a slew of angel backers.
https://charm.land/blog/the-next-generation/
There used to be development of enterprise and cloud offerings, but that seems to have disappeared.
Hopefully they keep the "hobby project that people decided to throw money at" vibe and don't start chasing business incentives.
monster_truck | a day ago
Why is it so hard to figure out what any of this does? I just want some screenshots
amingilani | a day ago
collingreen | 11 hours ago
nsonha | a day ago
otterley | a day ago
(That said, I do appreciate the artistic flair that went into their website.)
oefrha | a day ago
switchbak | a day ago
oefrha | a day ago
jasongi | a day ago
I find the pattern of showing interactive TUI if required options/flags are omitted much nicer than showing an error/help output.
sanex | a day ago
beart | a day ago
It feels a bit like visiting Fallingwater and complaining that there are no arrows pointing to the bathroom.
switchbak | a day ago
oDot | a day ago
https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley
skybrian | a day ago
oDot | a day ago
https://imgur.com/St8O8Gm
bikelang | a day ago
mvdtnz | a day ago
thoughtfulchris | a day ago
Anomaly, which builds OpenCode + OpenTUI), is also doing some really interesting stuff in this space with their custom renderer. And then there's Ink (https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink) which is what Claude Code uses. I also built Ink Web (https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web) to make Ink work in the browser.
The virality of OpenClaw and Claude Code has me wondering if terminals could actually go mainstream (eg used by non-tech users). More thoughts here: https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-03-05-terminals-are-cool-ag...
TheDong | 23 hours ago
My experience has been that agents suck at using TUIs, and are good at using CLIs. I would argue that agents are a reason that TUIs might die in favor of CLIs.
thoughtfulchris | 22 hours ago
The more interesting scenario IMO is having apps that are both TUIs AND CLIs where the agent uses the CLI but can pause and show the user a TUI for complex tasks where the user needs to input something.
jcgl | 15 hours ago
I’m very skeptical. Why would you think that? TUIs inherently don’t provide programmatically accessible affordances; if they have any affordances at all, they’re purely visual cues that have unstandardized and of varying quality.
Compare that to the DOM in a browser where you’ve got numerous well-understood mechanisms to convey meaning and usability. Semantic HTML and ARIA roles. These things systematically simplify programmatic consumption.
ramoz | a day ago
There's something about the UX here, how we're interfacing in an abstract way directly with the computer, now with agents. I hope we can get some interesting design study insights over the coming months and years.
I don't see a UI replacing the experience we get with TUIs. Also, UIs seem very clunky, in relation to TUIs performance.
JSR_FDED | a day ago
roryirvine | 18 hours ago
This website is a bit too hyperactive for my taste, and I can't imagine how they hope to make enough money from it to satisfy the VCs. But Bubbletea really is a great TUI and it's properly open source - so I'm happy to enjoy it while it lasts.
I'm with you on the Turbo Vision love, though. Honestly, it felt we were getting to such a good place in the early/mid 90s with beautiful, well-thought-out TUIs becoming the norm.
In retrospect, the universality of basic curses/ncurses on Unix/Linux (together with the death of DOS) was a real a step back - trapping us in a local pessimum for far too long. TUIs languished, and most of us moved to a mix of CLIs and GUIs.
(There's an MIT-licensed port of Turbo Vision available now at https://github.com/magiblot/tvision - pity that it's a couple of decades too late!)
eieio | a day ago
I spent a while hacking on my own fork of the Bubbletea renderer over the last few months in order to run a game over SSH[1]. It was a ton of work for a niche, simple game (snake) but it dropped bandwidth usage by a factor of 10. The new renderer has to be more general so it might not quite hit that for all applications, but I bet it's not that far off.
I could also see it being an even more significant gain for apps that use a lot of modern colors and styling, since escape sequences there can be very long / heavy weight.
Some of the comments here are annoyed about the website branding but FWIW I think bubbletea and lipgloss (and wish, if you want SSH stuff) are really excellent tools for building "boring" TUIs too.
[1] https://eieio.games/blog/secure-massively-multiplayer-snake/
TheDong | a day ago
The github url is https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea, so you can easily guess how to import it:
Yup, very easy to just look at the github url and guess. And now that you've imported it, you can guess how to use it, right?Yup, start with "tea.Init()". Wait, where'd the "tea" come from? Silly, importing the above package url magically adds "tea" into the current file scope, it's obvious.
thiht | 20 hours ago
yvdriess | 16 hours ago
- "tea" is an explicit alias that was added to the import statement in the tutorial examples, which you did not reflect in your snippet:
- The following also just works as you expected, but directly assumed wouldn't work: The only surprise here is that the repository authors decided to change the name of the module between v1 and v2 of the package. The git branch tagged v2 contains a module named 'charm.land/bubbletea', earlier v1 branches are named 'github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea'. That's on them for breaking convention and surprising users, the go toolchain does not factor into, this beyond supporting versioning by naming convention.cobertos | 23 hours ago
I like that terminals have less surface area that browsers
vpribish | 22 hours ago
bakul | 22 hours ago
Chmouel | 20 hours ago
pekim | 13 hours ago
ho hum
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138688
xbar | 9 hours ago