TUI Design Study — llama-deck
A design study for llama-deck: ten rules of a convincing TUI, what a survey of 857 starred repositories signals about terminal polish, a code-level critique of llama-deck's UI layer, and an ordered change plan.
On this page
A design study for llama-deck, the keyboard-first TUI for discovering and running local llama.cpp models. Its thesis: the strongest TUIs feel dense, calm, and unmistakably native to the character grid — polish comes from hierarchy, alignment, semantic color, and instant response, not from adding more chrome.
What it covers#
- Ten rules of a convincing TUI — qualitative patterns distilled from terminal-community discussion: information first, honor the grid, make color mean something, keep chrome quiet.
- The star signal — what a local aggregation of 857 starred repositories says about which terminal projects read as “polished.”
- UI critique — a code-level review of llama-deck’s
src/uilayer: strong bones, too many frames. - Change plan — the fixes, in order, plus a compact design contract for the project.
- Themes — how a theme system can change appearance without changing meaning.
Read it#
Open the interactive study — the full study as a standalone page, with the evidence and limits stated in it.
Method and limits#
Compiled 2026-09-15 from three streams: terminal-community discussions around r/unixporn aesthetics, the local star aggregation (extracted 2026-09-11), and a static review of llama-deck’s UI code (2026-09-15). The application was not run live; the patterns are qualitative synthesis, not a formal survey.