Curated collection of DESIGN.md files for terminal UI — researched from real TUI source code.

Awesome TUI Design

Drop a DESIGN.md into your project, tell your AI agent "build me a terminal UI that looks like this" — and it just works.

Just like awesome-design-md does for web UI, we do the same for terminal UI. No SDK, no dependencies — just Markdown that AI reads natively.

How to Use

1. Pick a theme from the list below and download it into your project:

# e.g. claude-code — replace with any theme: lazygit, dracula, catppuccin...
curl -o DESIGN.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cola-runner/awesome-tui-design/master/designs/claude-code/DESIGN.md

2. Ask your AI agent:

Build me a terminal dashboard following the DESIGN.md in this project

Or clone the whole repo and let your agent pick a theme for you: git clone https://github.com/cola-runner/awesome-tui-design.git

Themes

AI & Agent CLIs

• Claude Code - Anthropic's coding agent. Warm terracotta #D77757 accent, dashed ASCII input borders, hot pink #FD5DB1 tool blocks, whimsical · ✢ ✳ ✶ ✻ ✽ thinking spinner
• Codex CLI - OpenAI's coding agent. Monochrome adaptive, cosine-wave shimmer animation, ▌│└ gutter output, 10 variants of 36-frame ASCII startup art
• Gemini CLI - Google's AI assistant. 33fps gradient brand spinner, semantic border colors by tool state, 15+ built-in theme system with color tokens

Popular TUI Applications

• Lazygit - Terminal git client (54k stars). Green bold active panel borders, multi-panel sidebar + diff layout, per-author commit graph colors, explosion easter egg
• k9s - Kubernetes CLI manager (28k stars). Cool aqua/dodgerblue palette, orange ASCII art logo, black-on-aqua row selection, 7 semantic status colors
• btop - System resource monitor (22k stars). Braille dot-matrix graphs, green-yellow-red gradient meters, inverted ┐title┌ title brackets, 3 graph render modes

Color Schemes

• Dracula - Signature purple + pink on blue-gray, full Dracula palette, dev-focused
• Catppuccin - Soothing pastels. Mauve primary, warm Mocha palette, rounded borders
• Nord - Arctic clean. Frost blue accents, structured single-line borders, Aurora status colors
• Gruvbox - Retro groove. Orange on warm cream, earthy tones, vintage feel
• Tokyo Night - Urban night lights. Blue + purple on storm bg, teal for data paths
• Rosé Pine - All natural. Warm pink accents on dark purple, dim muted borders
• Minimal - Zero noise. Single-line borders, monochrome with blue accent
• Cyberpunk - Neon rain. Cyan + magenta on deep blue-black, dense panel tiling
• Ocean - Deep sea calm. Rounded borders, soft blues and seafoam green
• Retro - CRT amber glow. Double-line borders, ALL CAPS headers, dot leaders

Not just color palettes

Unlike web DESIGN.md files that extract CSS, our TUI themes are researched from actual source code — every hex value, every Unicode character, every animation frame is traceable to source.

Request a DESIGN.md

Open an issue to request a theme for any TUI application or color scheme.

Create Your Own

mkdir designs/my-theme && cp TEMPLATE.md designs/my-theme/DESIGN.md

See TEMPLATE.md for the full template and CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Preview Locally

python3 preview/preview.py --list                        # list all themes
python3 preview/preview.py designs/claude-code/DESIGN.md # preview one theme
python3 preview/gallery.py                               # generate HTML gallery

License

MIT — see LICENSE