awesome-terminal-aesthetics

A curated list of tools, frameworks, and libraries that make the terminal genuinely beautiful to build with and look at.

Not just functional — delightful. Every entry here earns its place through great DX, visual polish, or both.

TUI Frameworks

Build full terminal UIs with great ergonomics.

Ratatui rust — Immediate-mode TUI library. Composable widgets, excellent docs, huge community.
Cursive rust — Ergonomic TUI with a focus on composable views and clean event handling.
indicatif rust — Progress bars and spinners. The polished standard for Rust CLIs.
dialoguer rust — Interactive prompts with great defaults. Pairs naturally with indicatif.
Bubble Tea go — Elm-inspired TUI framework. Clean architecture, part of the Charm ecosystem.
tview go — Rich widget library built on tcell. Tables, forms, modals — all polished.
Ink ts — React for CLIs. Components, hooks, and the full React mental model in your terminal.
OpenTUI ts — High-performance terminal rendering with a focus on visual fidelity.
blessed js — A curses-like library for Node.js with a high-level terminal interface.

Libraries that make user input feel polished.

Clack ts — Effortlessly beautiful CLI prompts. The gold standard for onboarding flows.
@inquirer/prompts ts — The classic, fully modernised. Modular, typed, and composable.
Huh go — Forms and prompts from the Charm team. Feels native and refined.
promptui go — Interactive prompts with validation. Clean and idiomatic Go.
Survey go — Feature-rich interactive prompts. Excellent multi-select and autocomplete.
Enquirer js — Stylish, intuitive prompts. Great for scripting interactive CLIs.
Dax ts — Cross-platform shell scripting for Deno and Node.js with built-in prompts, progress bars, requests, and path helpers.

Make your CLI output look as good as a GUI.

Lip Gloss go — Declarative styling for terminal layouts. Borders, padding, colours, alignment.
pterm go — Comprehensive output library: spinners, tables, progress bars, trees. Very visual.
freeze go — Beautiful code screenshots straight from the terminal. Charm team.
Glamour go — Markdown rendering for the terminal. Gorgeous output with custom themes.
Chalk js — The de facto terminal string styling library. Simple, chainable, fast.
Colorette js — Minimal, fast terminal colours. No dependencies, no nonsense.
Kleur js — The fastest Node.js library for ANSI colours. Tiny and chainable.
Figlet.js js — ASCII art text banners in your terminal. Great for CLI splash screens.
lolcat ruby — Rainbow colouring for terminal output. Pure joy.
ora js — Elegant terminal spinner. The go-to for Node.js CLIs.
listr2 ts — Task lists with beautiful nested output. Great for CLI pipelines.
gradient-string js — Colour gradients applied to terminal strings. Great for splash screens.
shui zsh — A token-based design system for Zsh scripts. Semantic components, themes, and icon sets — one file to source.

Tools you use every day that happen to look exceptional.

bat rust — A cat clone with syntax highlighting, line numbers, and git integration.
eza rust — A modern ls with icons, colours, and tree view.
delta rust — Syntax-highlighted diffs for git. Transforms git diff into something beautiful.
gitui rust — Blazing fast terminal-ui for git. Keyboard-driven and snappy.
bottom rust — Customisable graphical process/system monitor for the terminal.
Starship rust — The minimal, blazing-fast, infinitely customisable prompt.
Zoxide rust — A smarter cd command. Fast, minimal, and elegant.
fd rust — A simple, fast, and user-friendly alternative to find.
ripgrep rust — Recursively searches directories. Faster and friendlier than grep.
lazygit go — A simple terminal UI for git. Feels magical to use.
lazydocker go — The same lazygit treatment for Docker. Effortless container management.
fzf go — A command-line fuzzy finder. Deceptively powerful, universally useful.
Gum go — Shell script glamour. Declarative, beautiful shell interactions in one binary.

Environments that elevate the whole terminal experience.

Zellij rust — A terminal workspace with a focus on UX and discoverability. Layouts, plugins, and a beautiful default config.
Nushell rust — A new shell with structured data, pipelines, and stunning table output.

Emulators that take aesthetics seriously.

WezTerm rust — GPU-accelerated with deep Lua config. Ligatures, multiplexer, and beautiful defaults.
Alacritty rust — The original GPU-accelerated terminal. Fast, minimal, config-driven.
Rio rust — A hardware-accelerated terminal with a focus on performance and modern typography.
Ghostty zig — Blazing fast, native, and visually refined. Exceptional font rendering.

Typefaces that make reading code in a terminal a pleasure.

Nerd Fonts — Patched fonts with thousands of icons. Essential for icon support in TUI tools.
JetBrains Mono — Designed specifically for developers. Excellent legibility and ligatures.
Fira Code — Monospace font with programming ligatures. The classic choice.
Cascadia Code — Microsoft's take on a coding font. Cursive italic variant is beautiful.
Monaspace — A superfamily of fonts from GitHub Next. Five typefaces, one system.

Themes that travel across your whole terminal stack.

Catppuccin — Soothing pastel palette. Ports for everything: editors, terminals, TUI frameworks.
Palenight — Deep blue-purple palette inspired by Material Design. Easy on the eyes for long sessions.
Rosé Pine — All natural pine, faux fur and a bit of soho vibes.
Tokyo Night — A clean, dark theme celebrating the lights of downtown Tokyo at night.
Kanagawa — Inspired by the colours of the famous painting by Katsushika Hokusai.
Gruvbox — Retro groove colour scheme. Warm, contrasty, and timeless.
Nord — An arctic, north-bluish colour palette. Clean and icy.
Dracula — A dark theme with vivid colours. One of the most ported themes in existence.
base16 — A framework for building consistent themes across hundreds of apps.

Things that exist purely to make you go "wait, that runs in a terminal?".

Charm VHS go — Record terminal GIFs from code. Perfect for README demos.
asciinema rust — Record and share terminal sessions. The standard for terminal screencasting.
pipes.sh zsh — Animated pipes in your terminal. A classic screensaver reimagined.

This list is opinionated by design. If you have a suggestion, open an issue with a brief note on why it fits the aesthetics bar — not just utility.