The call to action, "to make 2026 the year of Java in the terminal", was quickly responded to by the launch of TamboUI, the first modern TUI Java library. Inspired by Ratatui (presumably the library used to develop the Claude CLI), it promises support ranging from low-level terminal drawing to high-level APIs, including components and event handling. Currently at version 0.3.0, it has already been adopted by major projects such as Maven and Spring.
Andersen’s blog post from early January encouraged the Java community to build textual user interfaces in Java, rather than other programming languages. He insisted that the language’s maturity and capabilities make it at least as good as Python, Rust, or Go for developing TUIs.
Andersen:What’s different now is not nostalgia for terminals—it’s pressure. Developers today expect fast feedback, low ceremony, and tools that meet them where they already work.
Andersen noted that packaging and distribution, once a hurdle for Java CLIs, now benefit from native options and simpler runtime delivery that align with the low-ceremony expectations of today’s developers. Java’s mature libraries and multi-platform reliability are perfectly suited to CLI use cases, creating an imperative to build new terminal tooling in Java rather than other languages.
A Bluesky conversation about the Claude Code CLI sparked the idea of a new Java TUI library, which was later announced in a co-authored blog post as the official launch of TamboUI. Champeau promises that the newly launched library will elevate the state of the Java ecosystem's UI-building capabilities from "primitive" to modern, offering a broader range of capabilities, closer to the community used with higher-level capabilities. It provides APIs that go from low-level, basically "drawing" on a terminal, to high-level APIs such as components, event handling, CSS, etc.
Champeau: [TamboUI] offers to Java developers the same capabilities they had for years on desktop apps (e.g., JavaFX) in the terminal. To further understand the state of the library and the motivation for developing it, InfoQ reached out to Andersen and Champeau for additional comments.
InfoQ: Why is Java suitable now for developing efficient TUIs?
Max Rydahl Andersen:
Distribution should be simple by default - users shouldn’t care about JARs, classpaths or JVM flags. The CLI should feel installable and runnable like any native tool. Tools like JReleaser, combined with JBang, make it trivial to package and distribute full-blown applications via all major packaging ecosystems. The experience is similar to what people know from npm/pip/pipx/npx/uvx.
InfoQ: What still needs to happen for friendly terminal UIs in Java?
Max Rydahl Andersen:Technically, we need modern terminal UI libraries with proper layout and widgets, keyboard and mouse support, Unicode done right, images where terminals support them, and styling that looks intentional rather than accidental.
Culturally, it is not helpful to place Java on an imaginary pedestal, treating it as only "for the enterprise" or "for microservice architectures". The majority of Java's
owntools, its compiler, build tools, dependency managers, and testing tools live in the terminal. Yet we consistently underinvest in making that experience great.These two aspects need to change.
InfoQ: What did you learn from the other ecosystems?
Champeau:The initial idea came from Ratatui, which is Rust-based. However, Ratatui is still quite low-level, particularly compared to what Java developers are used to. So it became obvious to us that we wanted to go higher in terms of levels of abstraction. We borrowed ideas from other frameworks like Charm or Bubbletea, but were also inspired by the Java desktop ecosystem, integrating ideas from Swing and JavaFX. In a nutshell, the idea is to provide the same levels of abstraction that Java developers are used to, with well-suited APIs for modern Java. It was also important to us that TamboUI's architecture is modular and that users can choose the level of abstraction they want to use, from the lowest to the highest. I think that’s fairly unique in the TUI ecosystem: other frameworks tend to come with their own model, where we offer the option to build your own if you wish to.
InfoQ: So, is Java suitable for building CLIs?
Champeau:Without any doubt! I would add that if you are worried about the startup time or distribution, we have also thought about that from day 1: TamboUI is fully compatible with GraalVM, which lets you build native binaries from your Java sources. It means that in practice, you can ship a ~10MB executable that includes everything needed, starts immediately, and has a reduced memory footprint. That’s the last gap we had to fix before comparing ourselves to other languages like Go.
The new Java TUI alternative was quickly adopted, integrated into the Quarkus ecosystem for responsive dev shells, and used to power the Maveniverse Pilot's interactive build log dashboard and create the console-based Spring Initializr TUI. An additional example of Spring integration is the TamboUI Spring Boot integration. Besides this, the announcement received positive feedback from the broader community.