TUI-use: Give AI Agents Access to Interactive Terminal Programs
There's a gap in agent tooling that nobody talks about. AI coding agents can run bash commands all day, but they can't interact with interactive terminal programs β things like vim, lazygit, htop, psql, or any installation wizard that expects you to press arrow keys and hit Enter. TUI-use fills that gap.
It spawns programs in a pseudo-terminal, captures the visual output as plain text via a full VT renderer, and lets agents send keystrokes including arrow keys, function keys, and control sequences. The agent sees exactly what a human would see on screen, plus metadata about highlighted elements and menu selections. Think of it as giving agents hands to use the parts of the terminal that bash can't reach.
The use cases are more practical than they sound. Database CLIs like psql and redis-cli are interactive. Package managers ask confirmation questions. Python REPLs need back-and-forth. Git tools like lazygit have TUI interfaces. Today, agents either skip these tools entirely or use hacky workarounds. TUI-use makes them first-class citizens in the agent's toolkit.
Showing up on Hacker News this week as a Show HN with 31 points and active discussion. Early stage β 77 stars on GitHub, macOS and Linux support, npm installable. Small project but solves a real problem that compounds as agents take on more complex terminal workflows.
https://github.com/onesuper/tui-use
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It spawns programs in a pseudo-terminal, captures the visual output as plain text via a full VT renderer, and lets agents send keystrokes including arrow keys, function keys, and control sequences. The agent sees exactly what a human would see on screen, plus metadata about highlighted elements and menu selections. Think of it as giving agents hands to use the parts of the terminal that bash can't reach.
The use cases are more practical than they sound. Database CLIs like psql and redis-cli are interactive. Package managers ask confirmation questions. Python REPLs need back-and-forth. Git tools like lazygit have TUI interfaces. Today, agents either skip these tools entirely or use hacky workarounds. TUI-use makes them first-class citizens in the agent's toolkit.
Showing up on Hacker News this week as a Show HN with 31 points and active discussion. Early stage β 77 stars on GitHub, macOS and Linux support, npm installable. Small project but solves a real problem that compounds as agents take on more complex terminal workflows.
https://github.com/onesuper/tui-use
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