TextUI

A dependency-free TypeScript terminal UI runtime. Screens are plain data; JSX is one way to write them.

import { createApp, registerBuiltins } from '@textui/core';
import { createNodeTerminal } from '@textui/terminal';

const app = createApp({
  terminal: createNodeTerminal(),
  root: <Dashboard />,
  onBoot: registerBuiltins,
});

await app.start();

Pre-1.0. The surface is still moving.

The one idea

JSX compiles to data. <Row gap={1}/> and { component: 'Row', gap: 1 } are the same value, and the runtime mounts either. A screen can be written in TypeScript, loaded from JSON, generated, edited or sent over a wire without the runtime changing - and components are resolved by name at mount time, so what renders is a registration rather than an import.

Everything else follows from that: one reactive store addressed by paths, typed registries for components, commands, themes, shells and resources, and a renderer that diffs cells rather than redrawing frames.

Where to start

If you want	Read
Something running	Getting started
The words the rest of this assumes	The vocabulary
The model, end to end	Architecture
What was chosen, and what it cost	Decisions and tradeoffs

The subsystems

Section	What it covers
Store	Paths, scopes, computed, collections, providers, events
Components	The catalog, and how to write one
Themes	Tokens, glyphs, borders, capability downgrade, syntax
Platform	Commands, keybindings, focus, layers, screens, extension points
Terminal	Adapters, capabilities, managed and embedded sessions
Documents	Resource kinds, providers, viewers, editors, buffers
CLI	The developer CLI and the registry model
Testing	The harness, and what to assert

Packages

Package	What it is
@textui/core	The runtime: store, registries, renderer, hooks, component catalog
@textui/terminal	Terminal adapters, capability detection, ANSI writing, input decoding
@textui/testing	Headless harness: semantic queries, input, resizing, time
@textui/cli	textui init / add / create / doctor, and primitives for your own CLI
components/	The source-copy registry - components you own, not import
playground/	The showcase, fourteen focused playgrounds, and a filesystem explorer

Development

pnpm install
pnpm build          # every package
pnpm typecheck      # every workspace
pnpm test           # every suite
pnpm dev --list     # the playgrounds
pnpm dev gallery    # open one

Node ≥ 22, pnpm 10. The source is on GitHub.