Announcing TamboUI

TamboUI (pronounced like the french word “tambouille”, slang for "cooking up something" or "makeshift creation") was born a bit by accident: a couple months ago, Cédric was asking about which TUI libraries that tools like Claude Code were using. Max Andersen answered that most likely this was Ratatui, a framework written in Rust. Both thought that it was a bit sad that there was no such library for Java.

A few weeks later, Cédric did an experiment by asking AI (Claude Code) to port Ratatui to Java. The result was fairly impressive, and the beginning of a collaboration that led to the creation of TamboUI. In fact, Max gave you a hint last year that this was going to happen.

That said, TamboUI is not a Ratatui port nor is it a Textual port. We’ve put a lot of effort in going beyond the initial AI generated port. The library was designed with Java developers in mind, inspired by the good things found in other ecosystems’ approach to TUI frameworks. It offers a multi-layer API: from low-level widget primitives (like Ratatui), to a managed TUI layer with event handling, up to a declarative Toolkit DSL that handles the event loop and rendering thread for you—things that Ratatui doesn’t really cover. This brings the power of Ratatui, Textual or Rich to the Java ecosystem, with the Java touch!

Not only that, TamboUI is also GraalVM native compatible! This means that you can compile your Java TUI applications as native binaries, making Java a first class citizen in terminal applications development, with low memory footprints and fast startup!

If you want to give it a try, the easiest is to run our demos using JBang:

At this stage, the APIs are still unstable and subject to change. TamboUI is developed with the mindset of being framework-agnostic and having as few external dependencies as possible. You can choose between several backends like JLine, Aesh or the built-in Panama backend. By choosing the latter, you’ll get the best performance while not depending on any external library.

Whether you want to build:

Give TamboUI a try and let us know what worked and what could be improved!

Check out the documentation at https://tamboui.dev/docs/main/, join us on Zulip, or browse the source on GitHub. We’d love your feedback and contributions!

We would like to thank the following people for their ideas, suggestions and contributions to the creation of first public release of TamboUI (in alphabetical order):

and of course to the Ratatui and Textual creators for their inspiration and work.