tui-use

tui-use is an open-source CLI tool that enables AI agents to interact with interactive terminal programs that expect a human at the keyboard. It spawns programs in a PTY, reads the screen as plain text, and sends keystrokes — bridging the gap between AI agents and programs like REPLs, debuggers, and full-screen TUI applications. Built in TypeScript and distributed via npm, it works with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and other AI coding agents.

• Full VT Rendering — PTY output is processed by a headless xterm emulator, so ANSI escape sequences, cursor movement, and screen clearing all work correctly; the screen field is always clean plain text.
• Smart Wait — wait blocks until the screen has been stable for a configurable idle window (debounce), eliminating the need for sleep guesses; wait --text <pattern> adds semantic readiness signals.
• Snapshot Model — Interaction is an explicit read-decide-type loop with no async streams, no timing guesswork, and no partial output to reassemble.
• Highlights Detection — Every snapshot includes a highlights field listing inverse-video spans on screen, letting agents identify selected menu items, tabs, or buttons without parsing text.
• Session Management — A background daemon persists PTY sessions across CLI calls; sessions can be listed, switched, renamed, and killed via simple commands.
• Scroll & Search — scrollup/scrolldown navigates terminal history; find <pattern> searches the current screen with regex support.
• Plugin Support — Includes ready-made plugin bundles for OpenAI Codex and Claude Code, installable from a self-hosted marketplace in just a few steps.
• Cross-platform Prebuilds — Automatically detects platform and uses prebuilt binaries; falls back to source compilation when needed (macOS and Linux; Windows not yet supported).

To get started, install globally with npm install -g tui-use, then use tui-use start <cmd> to spawn a program, tui-use wait to wait for it to settle, tui-use type "<text>" to send input, and tui-use snapshot to read the current screen.