Thanks for sharing. Very … interesting. Just trying to understand why the heck would React be the best tool here?

React is just an abstraction of a State -> View function.

While not universally applicable, it's very convenient during development to focus on State without thinking about View, or focus on View without thinking about State.

The concept itself has nothing to do with the actual renderer: HTML, TUI, or whatever. You can render your state to a text file if you want to.

So the flickering is caused either by a faulty renderer, or by using a render target (terminal) that is incompatible with the UI behavior (frequent partial re-renders, outputting a lot of text etc.)

Thats the problem. Some developers want to avoid learning another programming language and use one for everything (including their technologies.)

Using TS, React here doesn’t make sense for stability in the long term. As you can see, even when they replaced Ink and built their own, the problem still exists.

There are other alternatives that are better than whatever Anthropic did such as Bubbletea (Go) or Ratatui (Rust) which both are better suited for this.

Maybe they were thinking more about job security with TypeScript over technical correctness and a robust implementation architecture and this shows the lack of it.

I’m a fan of Bubbletea, but it is significantly less ergonomic than React. Although I’d argue that if that starts to matter significantly, your TUI is probably too cluttered anyway and you should pare it down.

I genuinely thought this was satire until I looked it up. I guess it's just to make us webdevs feel at home in the Terminal (ooh, spooky!)

React separates into layers.

Any web react project out there will install react AND react-dom, which is the son implementation of react.

It’s how react translates into mobile, web, etc so well.

It defines contracts and packages like react-dom handle th specific implementation.

Building a react renderer has long been on my wish list of weekend (>1 weekend most likely) projects.

gemini-cli, opencode are also react based

Opencode uses SolidJS:

    We moved from the go+bubbletea based TUI which had performance and capability issues to an in-house framework (OpenTUI) written in zig+solidjs

https://opencode.ai/docs/1-0/

React?!

Good grief get me off this sloppy ride.