If you spend most of your day in the terminal — especially nowadays with Claude Code and other agentic AI tools, many of which ship with a CLI or TUI (Text-based User Interface: a UI rendered with text and ASCII/Unicode characters that runs entirely inside your terminal, instead of in a graphical window) — you know the pain of constantly switching between your terminal session, a desktop IDE, and your browser. That's particularly true when you need to review a teammate's PR or work on your own.
I built gitui because I got tired of doing that.

What is gitui?

gitui is a small terminal app for managing your GitHub pull requests. You run it inside any repo on your machine and it shows the open PRs, lets you open one, read the description, check the CI status, look at the files changed, and approve or merge it — all from the terminal.

That's it. No browser, no extra tabs, no hunting through GitHub's UI.

Why you might like it

• It's fast. It opens instantly and feels snappy because it's a TUI, not a web app.
• No tokens, no setup. It uses the GitHub CLI (gh) you probably already have. If gh is logged in, gitui just works.
• Mouse and keyboard both work. Click, scroll, drag-to-copy text — or stay on j/k if you're a vim person. Both are first-class.
• It stays out of the way. Read-only by default for browsing; the actions that change things (approve, merge, close) ask for confirmation before they fire.

Try it in 60 seconds

You need the GitHub CLI installed and logged in (gh auth login). After that:

Homebrew (macOS, Linux):

brew install thalesbruno/tap/gitui

npm:

npm install -g @thalesbruno/gitui

Then cd into any GitHub repo and run:

gitui

That's the whole tour.

The keys you'll actually use

• j / k (or arrows, or scroll) to move around
• enter to open a PR
• 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 to switch between Overview, Conversation, Commits, and Files
• o to open the PR on github.com if you really need to
• a to approve, m to merge (both ask twice before doing anything)
• q to quit

There's a ? panel inside the app that shows everything else, so you don't need to memorize this.

Under the hood

For the curious: gitui is built with Bun, React 19, and OpenTUI — a relatively new library for making terminal UIs feel like real apps. Every GitHub call is just a shell-out to gh, which means there's no token plumbing and no API client to maintain. If gh pr list works in your terminal, gitui works.

Where it's going

For now, gitui is small. It does one thing — browse and act on PRs in the current repo — and tries to do that one thing well. The next steps are about bringing more features from GitHub's web interface into the terminal.

Give it a spin

If this looks even a little useful to you, please give it a try:

• Repo: github.com/thalesbruno/gitui
• A star helps a lot, and issues/feedback are very welcome.

If you do try it, I'd love to hear what felt good and what didn't :)