charmbracelet/bubbletea

Bubble Tea is a Go framework for building interactive terminal user interfaces (TUIs), programs that run inside a terminal window and respond to keyboard and mouse input, but look far more polished than a plain command-line tool. Think of tools like file managers, interactive git clients, or configuration wizards that run entirely in your terminal. The framework solves a specific design problem: building interactive terminal apps traditionally means managing a lot of messy state, tracking what is on the screen, deciding when to redraw, handling keyboard input, and keeping everything consistent. This quickly becomes spaghetti code. Bubble Tea solves this by applying a design pattern called The Elm Architecture (originally from a web programming language called Elm), which enforces a clean separation of concerns. Here is how it works: your application has three pieces. The Model holds all application state (what items are in a list, what the cursor position is, what has been selected). The Update function receives events like keypresses or network responses and returns a new version of the model, it never mutates state directly. The View function takes the current model and returns what should be rendered on screen. Bubble Tea's runtime calls these three functions in a loop, handling all the low-level terminal drawing, cursor management, color output, and resize events for you. An optional component library called "Bubbles" provides ready-made building blocks like text inputs, progress bars, and list pickers. You would use Bubble Tea when building a developer tool, CLI configuration wizard, database browser, deployment dashboard, or any program where you want a rich, interactive terminal experience instead of a flat sequence of prompts. It is well-suited for both small inline widgets and full-screen applications. The stack is Go, with no external runtime dependencies beyond the Bubble Tea library itself.