The terminal’s return as a serious surface for new tools (Claude Code, Codex, Omarchy) has mostly been read as a developer aesthetic story. Alcides Fonseca reads it as the receipt for thirty years of GUI toolkit churn. He walks the platforms one by one (Windows, Linux, macOS), then through Electron, then through the failed restarts (Google’s Flutter UI, Zed’s GPUI), and ends on TUIs as the place developers go when none of the layers above hold up.

Fonseca on macOS:

Apple used to be a one-book religion. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines used to be cited by every User Interface course over the world. Xerox PARC and Apple were the two institutions that studied what it means to have a good human interface. Fast forward a few decades, and Apple is doing the best worst it can to break all the guidelines and consistency it was known for.

This isn’t a nostalgia complaint. Fonseca lists the live breaks (Fitts’ law getting ignored, the Tahoe window-resizing saga that didn’t stay fixed, the icons cluttering Apple menus) and treats them as the same class of failure as Microsoft’s WinForms-WPF-Silverlight-WinUI-MAUI parade. The mechanism differs but the outcome is the same: the platform stops being a place a designer can rely on.

Fonseca on Electron:

Looking at my dock, I have 8 native apps (text mate and macOS system utilities) and 6 electron apps (Slack, Discord, Mattermost, VScode, Cursor, Plexampp). And that’s from someone who really wishes he could avoid having any electron app at all. […] These are actions that should be the same across every macOS application, and even if there are shortcuts, they are not announced in the menus.

The dock count is the right way to measure it. RAM is the visible cost of Electron; the invisible cost is that every Electron app becomes its own little keyboard regime, with shortcuts that often don’t match the rest of the system and aren’t announced in menus when they do exist. Fonseca’s Cursor example (can you keyboard from the agent panel to the agent list and archive an item) is the kind of question any pre-Electron Mac app would have answered yes to. Most Electron apps answer maybe, with a shortcut their vendor invented.

His prescription that follows (make HCI mandatory in CS curricula, fail student projects with bad UIs, push OS vendors to invest in toolkits developers want to use) is correct in shape and probably wrong about leverage. Students aren’t the bottleneck. Apple and Microsoft have already read Norman. TUIs are back because the platforms quit, and the curriculum can’t fix that.

Fonseca’s diagnosis is right. The prescription is narrower. The TUI escape hatch works for developers because their work is text. Designers don’t get the same exit when the canvas is the medium itself.

Bonus: Speaking of TUIs, TUIStudio is a macOS app for designing terminal UIs, just like Figma!