Ink
Ranked 5 of 14 terminal UI libraries by recommenders
Popular React-based library for building componentized terminal interfaces, free and open source. Critics say its clear-and-redraw rendering causes flicker, lag and bugs.
Popular React-based library for building componentized terminal interfaces, free and open source. Critics say its clear-and-redraw rendering causes flicker, lag and bugs.
34 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 21
- approval share
- 38%
Recommended in 8 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: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 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
Componentized React-style terminal menus and dialogs
“makes a lot of sense for interactive CLIs where you want to componentize your menus and dialogs”
Comment from 20 Jun 2026 in “Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore” “frameworks, available for a range of languages, that make it easy to create nice-looking TUIs”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “Why TUIs Are Back” “Ink (and modern alternatives) probably are the best TUI toolkit.”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Anthropic acquires Bun” - Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Claude Chill: Fix Claude Code's Flickering in Terminal”
Good-looking, fast, well-aligned output
“frameworks, available for a range of languages, that make it easy to create nice-looking TUIs”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “Why TUIs Are Back” “It's faster and aligns better.”
Comment from 11 Jan 2026 in “ASCII-Driven Development” Enthusiastic hands-on experiences
“yeah I've tried out Ink and it's great”
Comment from 20 Jul 2026 in “Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now” “OMG we can use ink for that”
Comment from 9 Feb 2026 in “UEFI Bindings for JavaScript”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Clears and redraws screen, causing flicker
“The problem is they are using the Ink library which clears and redraws for each update.”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Claude Chill: Fix Claude Code's Flickering in Terminal” “The flickering issue due to the Ink library has been a headache for a long time”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Claude.ai silently failing since Jan 14, no official acknowledgment” “really the right approach is not to clear the screen (or erase lines) at all”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent” - Comment from 11 May 2026 in “Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics”
Slow, heavy rendering and JS runtime
“It has some rough edges in terms of rendering performance but it's nice overall.”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “Claude Opus 4.6” “a TUI rendered by Ink, a React library, with a full JS runtime in the background”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux” “It seems like almost all the CLIs are choking because of nodejs ink library”
Comment from 25 Feb 2026 in “Claude Code Remote Control” - Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “Anthropic acquires Bun”
- Comment from 3 May 2026 in “Why TUIs Are Back”
Buggy, often forked or replaced
“We started by using Ink, and at this point it's our own framework due to the number of changes we've made to it over the months.”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'” “They chose to use react.js in the terminal via ink, and essentially footgun their way through each update.”
Comment from 14 Feb 2026 in “Building a TUI is easy now” “It's currently pretty buggy though unfortunately.”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Claude Chill: Fix Claude Code's Flickering in Terminal” - Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'”
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 Tea | 37 | 16 | 70% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Textual | 34 | 2 | 94% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Turbo Vision | 26 | 5 | 84% | 9 | — | Approved |
| InkThis page | 13 | 21 | 38% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
38 of the 39 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“expectations formed by other TUI apps are broken with such an approach”
“one managed .NET 8 DLL of 913 KB, zero NuGet dependencies, no native binaries, no P/Invoke”
“yeah I've tried out Ink and it's great”
“makes a lot of sense for interactive CLIs where you want to componentize your menus and dialogs”
“the actual tool is free and open source”
“completely vibe coded with Ink”
“a TUI rendered by Ink, a React library, with a full JS runtime in the background”
“The diffing that ink does is just architecturally wrong.”
“big miss in the standard feature set IMO”
“caused many issues such as flickering, thrashing, and latency”
“Ink is the Electron of text-based apps”
“frameworks, available for a range of languages, that make it easy to create nice-looking TUIs”
“Now you can have JS bloat in your terminal too!”
“Love the gloating about 40x less RAM as if that amount of memory for a text REPL even approaches defensible.”
“things like Ink aren’t really amenable to porting to other languages easily”
“Because the screen is printed on each change with diffing, upon resize there is no issue”
“ive had the exact same issue w ink”
“Ink itself leaves something to be desired”
“It seems like almost all the CLIs are choking because of nodejs ink library”
“They chose to use react.js in the terminal via ink, and essentially footgun their way through each update.”
“OMG we can use ink for that”
“It has some rough edges in terms of rendering performance but it's nice overall.”
“Ink clears lines before rendering the page.”
“really the right approach is not to clear the screen (or erase lines) at all”
“The flickering issue due to the Ink library has been a headache for a long time”
“React and Ink is a popular and full featured option”
“I ran into issues with that in Ink”
“you're probably right about the Ink/React stack”
“even when they replaced Ink and built their own, the problem still exists”
“It's currently pretty buggy though unfortunately.”
“The problem is they are using the Ink library which clears and redraws for each update.”
“It's faster and aligns better.”
“The answer seems to be in the vendored ink.js”
“somehow people are making CLIs that lag and waste terminal space now”
“Ink seems to be the root cause of a major issue with the Claude Code CLI”
“Ink (and modern alternatives) probably are the best TUI toolkit.”
“We started by using Ink, and at this point it's our own framework due to the number of changes we've made to it over the months.”
“why choose a buggy / poorly designed TUI library”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.