Terminal CLI
Also called: Command-line UI, TUI style, Hacker terminal
Monospace everything, phosphor green and amber on black, prompt symbols, bracketed buttons and ASCII-boxed panels with a blinking cursor.
Design keywords
Say these words to ask for this style.
Terminal CLI makes a product look like it runs in a shell. Every glyph is monospace on a near-black screen; text is phosphor green, highlights are amber, and selection is shown in reverse video (green block, black text). Panels are single-line boxes with their title cut into the top border like a TUI, buttons read as [ commands ], labels look like --flags, progress bars are made of blocks, and a block cursor blinks after the headline. No radius, no gradients, no shadows — only characters.
Best for
- Developer tools, CLIs and API products
- Infra, DevOps and security dashboards
- Hackathon, CTF and indie-hacker sites
- AI agents that “run commands”
Avoid for
- Consumer apps for non-technical people
- Long-form reading for a general audience
- Luxury, wellness or kids brands
✓ Do
- Set every element in one monospace family and align to the character grid
- Use reverse video (green bg, black text) for the selected / primary state
- Prefix structure with real CLI syntax: $ for actions, > for output, -- for flags, ## for headings
✕ Don't
- No border-radius, gradients or drop shadows
- Don’t add neon magenta, glitch or angled corners — that is Cyberpunk
- Don’t use more than green + amber + one ANSI accent
Not to be confused with
On mobile
Keep the monospace grid but raise body size to 15px; the tab bar is a one-line status bar with the active tab in reverse video, and lists become boxed output blocks with > prefixes.
Prompt builder
Paste into Claude, Cursor, v0, Lovable or any coding agent to recreate this style.