github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

Bubbletea makes building terminal UIs surprisingly approachable through its Elm-inspired architecture. The Init/Update/View pattern feels natural once you understand the flow, and the official tutorials walk you through real examples like list-select and spinner components. I particularly appreciate how the package forces clean separation of concerns—your business logic lives in Update, rendering in View, and side effects become Commands. This makes debugging straightforward since state changes are predictable.

The ecosystem around Bubbletea is stellar. Lipgloss for styling and Bubbles for pre-built components integrate seamlessly, and the examples repository covers most common patterns. Error messages are helpful when you misuse tea.Cmd or forget to return a tea.Msg, though the interface{} typing for messages can occasionally lead to runtime panics if you're not careful with type assertions.

Community support is responsive—GitHub issues get attention quickly, and the maintainers actively provide guidance. The only real friction comes when managing complex nested components or coordinating multiple Commands, where you'll need to think carefully about message routing. Overall, it's the most enjoyable way to build CLI tools in Go.

Bubbletea is a terminal UI framework based on The Elm Architecture, and from a security perspective, it's refreshingly minimal. It doesn't handle network requests, authentication, or persistence—just terminal input/output. This narrow scope significantly reduces attack surface. The framework itself has no external dependencies beyond Go's standard library and sister Charm libraries, which minimizes supply chain risk.

The input validation story is straightforward: you receive terminal events (keypresses, mouse clicks) and return a new model state. There's no injection risk since you're rendering to a terminal buffer, not HTML or SQL. Error handling is explicit—panics are yours to manage in your Update function. The library doesn't leak stack traces or implementation details by default.

The main security consideration is that you're responsible for all input sanitization when your app interacts with external systems. Bubbletea won't help you there. It's purely a presentation layer. For CLI tools, admin panels, or local utilities where you control the execution environment, it's excellent. The deterministic update model makes security-relevant state transitions easy to audit.

Bubbletea brings Elm Architecture to Go TUIs with a clean, functional approach. The core concepts (Model, Update, View) are intuitive once you grasp them, and the type system guides you naturally. The `tea.Cmd` pattern for async operations is elegant, though it takes a session to internalize. Error messages are generally helpful, and the package panics rarely—mostly you'll deal with logical errors in your Update function.

The ecosystem integration with Bubbles (pre-built components) and Lipgloss (styling) is seamless. Documentation includes solid examples in the repo, though you'll often reference the examples directory more than godoc. The getting-started tutorial walks you through a complete app, which helps cement the mental model.

IDE support is standard Go—autocomplete works well, though the interface-heavy design means you sometimes need to dig into source to understand component behavior. Versioning has been stable; migrations between minor versions are typically painless. The main challenge is debugging—since everything flows through Update, printf debugging or careful state logging becomes essential.