Ito
Build Terminal UIs in Lua
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My friend and I are huge Neovim nerds. We like to rice our terminals and our editors. We just wanted a harness that we can do the same with, rice it till our hearts' desire. So, we started looking out for harnesses. Pi was great, Pi was good. But in the end, it was JavaScript. I don't have anything against JavaScript, but Lua is more fitting, and I can just as easily base it in Rust to make it even faster. So, we started cooking, and we ended up with a design that's minimal at its core and is built using Lua. Every built-in abstraction, the way you define providers, the way you rice it up, everything, literally everything, you can do in Lua.But how? How does it all work? I proposed we just do it the Ratatui way, but my friend was like, nah! We shall make it possible to build TUIs in Lua. (Weirdo!) But it paid off, and we got ourselves a shiny new Lua library, ito!!!He didn't get the gravity of the situation. We had an awesome terminal UI library in Lua! I wanted everyone to know how cool that is, so I got cooking, wrote myself a custom canvas implementation of this library instead of the usual terminal adaptor, exported it as wasm, and made this super cool website where you can experiment building awesome UIs in Lua. For vibe-coders, we got an llms.txt too. Have at it, and see if you can build something really cool with it. The library's at github.com/uji-labs/ito, and the awesome sauce harness is at github.com/uji-labs/uji.I hope you like it!
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HN · launched Oct 14, 2026 · 74 upvotes (top 15%)
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Similar launches
See all 130 similar launches →Could you build this?
Yes It is a Lua-based framework for building terminal UIs, a well-defined problem with known approaches to rendering, input handling, and layout. A solo developer can vibe-code a working version in weeks, and the Lua embedding is standard.
Discussion
12 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ratatui, morph.nvim, ncurses, Turbo Vision
Concerns raised: Un-idiomatic Lua API resembling Rust builder pattern
Feature requests: Idiomatic Lua table-based configuration API, Parenthesis-free call syntax support
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 130 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #31 of 131 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 348 days after the earliest competitor.
- PNANA · hn · 2026-01-28 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Bodge.app · hn · 2025-11-28 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I made a browser TUI with its own layout engine · hn · 2026-07-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Clx · hn · 2026-07-11 · 143 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Moongate · hn · 2026-03-06 · 287 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- I made a 2D Lua game engine using Rust with code and asset live reload · hn · 2026-05-19 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- My Terminal Themes Web App · hn · 2026-10-15 · 45 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the Terminal · hn · 2026-07-13 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.42
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