SwiftTUI

Build Swift Terminal User Interfaces

Views, State, Observation, Gestures, Animations—

SwiftUI semantics, drawn in terminal cells.

Try the web demoView source
Read the API reference
SourceCounterApp.swift
Open file
public import SwiftTUIRuntime

struct CounterView: View {

  @Environment(\.terminalSize) private var terminalSize
  @State private var count = 0
  @State private var activeRippleID: Int? = nil

  var body: some View {
    VStack(spacing: 1) {
      TextFigure("\(count)", font: .future)
        .frame(minWidth: 14, alignment: .center)
      Button("Increment") {
        count += 1
      }
    }
    .frame(maxWidth: .infinity, maxHeight: .infinity)
    .onChange(of: count) {
      if activeRippleID == nil {
        activeRippleID = count
      }
    }
    .background {
      if let rippleID = activeRippleID {
        RippleLayer(reach: reach) {
          if activeRippleID == rippleID {
            activeRippleID = nil
          }
        }
        .id(rippleID)
      }
    }
  }

  private var reach: Double {
    let horizontal = Double(terminalSize.width) / 2
    let vertical = Double(terminalSize.height)
    return (horizontal * horizontal + vertical * vertical).squareRoot()
  }
}
SwiftTUI appCompiled for browser with SwiftTUIWASI
Open separately

Run the exact source shown beside this frame.

Real SwiftTUI viewStatic WASI bundleCanvas with one-way semantic accessibility tree

Run this same counter in the terminal, SwiftUI, or a browser.

Clone the counter

Get started

A terminal and a toolchain. That's it.

SwiftTUI apps are plain SwiftPM packages: any Swift 6.3+ toolchain builds and runs them from the command line, on macOS, Linux, or Windows. You do not need an Xcode project, a simulator, or an app store. If you already run a current Xcode, its bundled toolchain is all you need.

Run the counterswift-tui-counter-demo
Open repo
# macOS, Linux, or Windows — any Swift 6.3+ toolchain
git clone https://github.com/SwiftTUI/swift-tui-counter-demo.git
cd swift-tui-counter-demo
swift run --package-path counter counter

The same counter as the live demo above, drawn in your own terminal. Space increments; Ctrl-C quits.

Pick a toolchain

swiftly, Swift's official toolchain installer for macOS and Linux, puts swift on your path in one step, without Xcode. On a Mac with a current Xcode, skip it: the toolchain is already installed. On Windows, use the swift.org installer instead.

Add it to your app

// Package.swift
.package(
  url: "https://github.com/SwiftTUI/swift-tui",
  .upToNextMinor(from: "0.9.6")
),
// in your executable target:
.product(name: "SwiftTUI", package: "swift-tui")
Read the documentation

Why SwiftTUI

A proven UI model, pointed at the terminal.

Most TUI toolkits make you choose between a low-level draw loop and a widget set with its own ad-hoc state story. SwiftTUI instead borrows the declarative model SwiftUI has proven at platform scale (the interface is a function of state) and aims it at terminal cells. You declare views; the framework owns layout, focus, redraw, and the terminal itself.

  1. 01

    State in, screen out

    There is no draw loop, no buffer diffing, and no repaint bookkeeping. Views are a pure function of your app's state: change a value and the runtime recomputes layout and rewrites exactly the cells that changed. SwiftUI has spent seven years hardening that model in production; here it is the entire programming model.

    View · @State · @Observable · body
  2. 02

    Real components, real focus

    Buttons, text fields, pickers, sliders, scroll views, and charts, with a focus engine, tab traversal, keyboard chords, tap · drag · hover gestures, and animation built in. You compose behavior instead of hand-routing key events to widgets.

    @FocusState · TapGesture · withAnimation · SwiftTUICharts
  3. 03

    The terminal, negotiated for you

    Truecolor, Kitty and Sixel images, OSC 8 hyperlinks, and mouse reporting are probed per session and degrade gracefully: one binary is correct in kitty, a bare SSH session, or CI. You write views, never escape codes.

    TerminalCapabilityProfile · Kitty · Sixel · OSC 8
  4. 04

    One compiled binary

    Swift 6 compiles your interface into a single fast executable with checked concurrency. Layout and state are type-checked at build time, and tests render frames as integer-cell rasters without a TTY.

    SwiftPM · Swift 6 · RasterSurface

How it compares

Capability axes against the other major TUI frameworks. The first three are the day-one terminal experience; the last three are where the same source can travel later.

frameworkTerminal renderingDeclarative UIPointer & gesturesNative app embedServed to browserStatic WASM build
SwiftTUI✓✓ SwiftUI-shaped✓ tap·drag·hover✓ SwiftUIHost · Android arm64 preview✓ WebHost · DOM✓ WASI · DOM
Bubble Tea (Go)✓✓ Elm arch~ mouse events———
Textual (Python)✓✓ widgets · CSS~ mouse · hover—✓ serve · xterm—
Ratatui (Rust)✓— immediate-mode~ backend only——~ Ratzilla · DOM
Ink (JS/React)✓✓ React————

Verified August 2026 against current releases: Bubble Tea 2.0 · Textual 8.2 · Ratatui 0.30 · Ink 7.1. ✓ first-party · ~ partial, separate package, or raw mouse events · — none. Ratzilla is a separate crate in the Ratatui org; Textual's browser host streams a server-side process through xterm.js. SwiftTUI's browser paths render to the DOM with a real accessibility tree for one-way semantic presentation; assistive-origin control actions are not part of the 0.9 preview.

Terminal first: when you need it, the same views also run in the browser, in native macOS and iOS windows, and in an Android arm64 preview. Android packaging is limited to arm64-v8a, API 28+, and NDK 27.3.13750724 through the AAR/Gradle-plugin path. Full IME marked/pre-edit composition is incomplete and semantics are one-way; a connected journey exists, but current candidate device acceptance remains pending. Start with the hosts & platforms guide, or go straight to swift-tui-web, swift-tui-swiftui, or swift-tui-android.

Showcase

Built with SwiftTUI.

The counter above fits on one screen. These do not. Both are maintained examples in swift-tui-examples: clone the repo and every example builds and runs with one command.

SwiftTUI GIF Editor with canvas, layers, tools, and a timeline
GIF EditorA canvas, layers, a scrubbable timeline, pointer tools, undo, and animated GIF export.
csvui displaying a large tab-separated table of world cities
csvuiA 34,000-row GeoNames city table, browsed and edited safely in place.
Browse every example and host

Further reading

Community

Build with us.

Development happens in public on GitHub, and the people building SwiftTUI are on Discord. Come ask questions, show what you are building, or talk through a contribution.

Join the DiscordSwiftTUI on GitHub