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Go-TUI – A framework for building declarative terminal UIs in Go

Go-TUI – A framework for building declarative terminal UIs in Go

by grindlemire·Mar 6, 2026·7 points·1 comment
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AI Analysis

●●SolidBig BrainNiche Gem

Templ-inspired declarative syntax for TUIs beats bubbletea's imperative model.

Strengths
  • •Declarative .gsx syntax with Tailwind-style classes compiles directly to Go option functions, eliminating boilerplate.
  • •Flexbox layout engine (yoga-based) handles responsive positioning without manual constraint wrestling.
  • •Reactive State[T] with automatic re-renders + pure components option gives developers both paradigms.
Weaknesses
  • •Terminal UI frameworks are niche; bubbletea dominates Go ecosystem with proven patterns and wider adoption.
  • •Early-stage (v0.1.2); ecosystem maturity, third-party components, and long-term maintenance unknown.
Target Audience

Go developers building terminal applications and CLIs

Similar To

Bubble Tea · Templ (web framework) · Lipgloss

Post Description

I've been building go-tui (https://go-tui.dev), a terminal UI framework for Go inspired by the templ framework for the web (https://templ.guide/). The syntax should be familiar to templ users and is quite different from other terminal frameworks like bubbletea. Instead of imperative widget manipulation or bubbletea's elm architecture, you write HTML-like syntax and Tailwind-style classes that can intermingle with regular Go code in a new .gsx filetype. Then you compile these files to type-safe Go using `tui generate`. At runtime there's a flexbox layout engine based on yoga that handles positioning and a double-buffered renderer that diffs output to minimize terminal writes.

Here are some other features in the framework:

- It supports reactive state with State[T]. You change a value and the framework redraws for you. You can also forego reactivity and simply use pure components if you would like.

- You can render out a single frame to the terminal scrollback if you don't care about UIs and just want to place a box, table, or other styled component into your stdout. It's super handy and avoids the headache of dealing with the ansi escape sequences directly.

- It supports an inline mode that lets you embed an interactive widget in your shell session instead of taking over the full screen. With it you can build things like custom streaming chat interfaces directly in the terminal.

- I built full editor support for the new filetype. I published a VS Code and Open-VSX extension with completion, hover, and go-to-definition. Just search for "go-tui" in the marketplace to find them. The repo also includes a tree-sitter grammar for Neovim/Helix, and an LSP that proxies Go features through gopls so the files are easy to work with.

There are roughly 20 examples in the repo covering everything from basic components to a dashboard with live metrics and sparklines. I also built an example wrapper for claude code if you wanted to build your own AI chat interface.

Docs & guides: https://go-tui.dev

Repo: https://github.com/grindlemire/go-tui

I'd love feedback on the project!

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