v2

v2.0.0 versions of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are out of beta and ready to rock.

These releases bring highly optimized rendering, advanced compositing, higher-fidelity input handling, and a more declarative API for very predictable output.

The v2 branches have been powering Crush, our AI coding agent, in production from the very beginning. That is to say, everything we’re releasing today has run under real-world constraints, on our own products, for months.

For details as well as upgrade guides for humans and LLMs see:

• Bubble Tea

  What’s New
  Upgrade Guide

• Lip Gloss

  What’s New
  Upgrade Guide

• Bubbles

  Upgrade Guide

But first, let’s talk about how we got here.

Why v2?

We started building terminal user interface tooling on the premise that the terminal is a better place to work (and play) than most people realize.

The foundation has always been there but what was missing was software for the next era and a lower barrier to entry for rich interaction. That’s where the innocently-named Bubble Tea (the interaction layer), Lip Gloss (the layout engine), and Bubbles (user interface primitives) began.

Today, the Bubble Tea ecosystem powers more than 25,000 open-source applications. Teams at NVIDIA, GitHub, Slack, Microsoft Azure and thousands of others build on top of them. And, throughout the history of the project, we’ve never pushed a breaking change.

So why a v2?

Things are changing. AI agents moved into the terminal, and suddenly the rest of the industry saw what many already knew: the terminal is the most powerful way to interface with the operating system. Coding tools followed. The terminal, which was previously somewhat of a niche preference, became a primary platform, and the weight it needed to carry changed. So we improved the parts that needed improving.

The heart of v2 is the Cursed Renderer. It’s modeled on the ncurses rendering algorithm and vastly improves what’s possible in our tooling. Rendering is faster and more efficient by orders of magnitude. For local applications this is very meaningful. For applications running over SSH, the changes are monetarily quantifiable.

v2 also reaches deeper into what emerging terminals can actually do. There’s richer keyboard support, inline images, synchronized rendering, clipboard transfer over SSH, and many more small, meticulous details. The terminal is quietly becoming far more capable than most developers realize, and v2 makes gracefully taking advantage of those capabilities very easy.

There’s a reason Bubble Tea supports inline mode as a first-class use case, a reason we chose a language that compiles to native machine code, and a reason we’re obsessed with performance in areas most frameworks don’t consider. The terminal is a powerful medium for both humans and machines, with real advantages—namely speed, composability, scriptability, and deep access to the OS—and it deserves production-grade software.

That’s v2.