January 9, 2026
Press Space for spicy synths
Show HN: Miditui – a terminal app/UI for MIDI composing, mixing, and playback
Text-based music studio drops; nostalgia vs AI hype
TLDR: Miditui is a text-based music studio you run in a terminal, open-sourced after help from AI tool Claude Opus 4.5. Comments split between nostalgic tracker love, excitement about an “AI Cambrian explosion,” and feature demands like quantization, with devs even racing to build rival keyboard-first sequencers.
Hacker News is humming after Miditui, a text-based music studio you run in a terminal, landed with mouse clicks, piano roll, and spacebar-to-play. MIDI is like sheet music for computers; a DAW is a digital audio workstation. The dev says Claude Opus 4.5 helped build it; after a viral demo, they polished and open-sourced. That admission lit the comments. Some users cheered an “AI enabled Cambrian explosion,” predicting anyone can ship wild tools in days. Others rolled their eyes with “everything old is new again” vibes, posting retro tracker videos and declaring the command-line groove never died.
Then came the feature feuds. Tracker diehards begged for quantization—quick tools to snap messy notes to clean rhythms—while a Rust fan claimed a spooky coincidence: they started building a keyboard-driven sequencer today, “vim for music.” That sparked a mini turf war over pure keyboard zen versus mouse-friendly piano rolls. People joked about making bangers in a terminal during meetings, while nostalgia fans dropped retro tracker videos. Meanwhile, practical folks asked about smooth audio and SoundFonts—downloadable instrument packs—while fans pointed to low-latency playback, autosave, and WAV export. Verdict: this humble app ignited nostalgia, rivalry, and AI angst—and made nerds actually jam.
Key Points
- •Miditui is a Rust-based terminal application providing a DAW-like experience for MIDI composing, mixing, and playback.
- •Features include full mouse support, piano roll, insert mode with QWERTY layout, project timeline, autosave, undo/redo, and low-latency 44.1kHz audio via rustysynth.
- •The app supports importing/exporting MIDI and JSON files and exporting compositions as WAV.
- •Installation is available via GitHub Releases binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows, or via cargo; a SoundFont (.sf2) is required.
- •A developer disclosure notes assistance from Claude Opus 4.5, with workflow analysis provided; a demo video is available.