Bubble Tea
Hacker ApprovedRanked 2 of 14 terminal UI libraries by recommenders
Go framework for building terminal user interfaces; people praise its ergonomics, aesthetics and reliability. Common caveat: it imposes its Elm-style architecture on projects.
Go framework for building terminal user interfaces; people praise its ergonomics, aesthetics and reliability. Common caveat: it imposes its Elm-style architecture on projects.
53 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 37
- criticize it
- 16
- approval share
- 70%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 37 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good-looking modern terminal interfaces
“It looks amazing. Websites and projects are allowed to have personality and use flashy colors.”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “The next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now” “some good libraries/frameworks (e.g. [1][2]) exist to make a modern-looking UX”
Comment from 30 Dec 2025 in “The Signature Flicker” “Love the ergonomics and aesthetics and can't wait to try out v2!”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “The next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now” - Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Mousefood – Build embedded terminal UIs for microcontrollers”
Easy to set up quickly
“it's pretty trivial to set up a TUI with bubbletea or ratatui”
Comment from 3 May 2026 in “Why TUIs Are Back” “Frameworks like bubbletea make it very easy these days.”
Comment from 20 Aug 2026 in “Zellij 0.45.0: nested sessions, Kitty graphics, a fresh UI” “Go + lipgloss + bubble tea and a single prompt will give you whatever you need in a minute or two”
Comment from 3 May 2026 in “Why TUIs Are Back” Fast, lightweight and robust
“Bubbletea, its inspiration, follows up on the philosophy of TUIs, fast, direct, lightweight in resources”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Giggles – A batteries-included React framework for TUIs” “by far the most robust and performant stack for building”
Comment from 3 May 2026 in “Why TUIs Are Back” “The terminal components work reliably, and have less UX bugs than the alternatives.”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “The next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now” Open source and mature
“Bubbletea really is a great TUI and it's properly open source”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “The next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now” “Mature tui packages like bubbletea, lipgloss”
Comment from 21 Mar 2026 in “OpenCode – The open source AI coding agent”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Hard to learn and less ergonomic
“I'm a fan of Bubbletea, but it is significantly less ergonomic than React”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Claude Chill: Fix Claude Code's Flickering in Terminal” “I often have a hard time understanding how to use charmbracelet effectively”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “A retro terminal music player inspired by Winamp” Bloated with unnecessary features
“they do bloat the program with unnecessary features”
Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “Ownership of open source flashcard app Anki transferred to for-profit AnkiHub” “doesn't use bloated frameworks like Ratatui/Bubbletea etc”
Comment from 12 May 2026 in “What do you NOT like about Cursor / VSCode / Claude Code desktop / Codex / etc.?” Inconsistent design and broken conventions
“That's on them for breaking convention and surprising users”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “The next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now” “quit it because of inconsistencies in the design”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Mousefood – Build embedded terminal UIs for microcontrollers” “I'd love to avoid repeating Charm's mistakes.”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Mousefood – Build embedded terminal UIs for microcontrollers” Imposes architecture on projects
“Bubbletea has the unfortunate side effect of enforcing style/architecture on a project”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go” “It completely takes over and rips apart my CLI structure.”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “The next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now”
Other terminal UI libraries people recommend
The four most recommended other terminal UI libraries, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ratatui | 57 | 6 | 90% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Bubble TeaThis page | 37 | 16 | 70% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Textual | 34 | 2 | 94% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Turbo Vision | 26 | 5 | 84% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Ink | 13 | 21 | 38% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 62 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“There's some reusability because it can just take a BubbleTea Help Model (holds keybindings), but it is limited.”
“Works well... commenting from it now. Claude chose Go and Bubble Tea”
“is my favorite for one-off throwaway stuff in terminal”
“Frameworks like bubbletea make it very easy these days.”
“I've been having a lot of fun with it compared to the React SPAs I've tried before”
“The CLI tool can be used to remote or embed any TTY program, but was generally built for BubbleTea.”
“TUI libraries like Lipgloss and Bubbletea really allow users to build a rich experience nowadays”
“doesn't use bloated frameworks like Ratatui/Bubbletea etc”
“I use Claude and the rest with BubbleTea all the time.”
“they are a great reason to use Go for TUI”
“I got excited about TUIs when I was exposed to the Bubble Tea framework for Go”
“it's pretty trivial to set up a TUI with bubbletea or ratatui”
“by far the most robust and performant stack for building”
“Go + lipgloss + bubble tea and a single prompt will give you whatever you need in a minute or two”
“I often have a hard time understanding how to use charmbracelet effectively”
“Mature tui packages like bubbletea, lipgloss”
“You should look at the list of projects using it and then realize you're already quite comfortable with bubbletea”
“That's on them for breaking convention and surprising users”
“Bubbletea really is a great TUI and it's properly open source”
“It completely takes over and rips apart my CLI structure.”
“It looks amazing. Websites and projects are allowed to have personality and use flashy colors.”
“The terminal components work reliably, and have less UX bugs than the alternatives.”
“are really excellent tools for building "boring" TUIs too”
“Love the ergonomics and aesthetics and can't wait to try out v2!”
“has a couple screencast worth checking out”
“Bubbletea, its inspiration, follows up on the philosophy of TUIs, fast, direct, lightweight in resources”
“It looks like a great improvement all round over 1.x.”
“great toolsets for their respective languages BubbleTea / Textualize / Ratatui”
“Bubbletea would be my tool of choice, I think”
“they do bloat the program with unnecessary features”
“I'd love to avoid repeating Charm's mistakes.”
“They're inspirations for us to make good looking stuff.”
“quit it because of inconsistencies in the design”
“Bubbletea can spell Go, which seems an encouraging indicator vs tview.”
“Bubbletea has the unfortunate side effect of enforcing style/architecture on a project”
“I'm a fan of Bubbletea, but it is significantly less ergonomic than React”
“Bubbletea (Go) or Ratatui (Rust) which both are better suited for this”
“a decent chunk of BubbleTea and friends bootstrapped”
“some good libraries/frameworks (e.g. [1][2]) exist to make a modern-looking UX”
“BubbleTea is great, but it doesn't have support for Kitty Graphics.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.