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strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

We’ve always found strace useful but somewhat hard to work with. Its output is often inscrutable, it’s hard to follow subprocesses or threads, and if you want to filter syscalls you have to rerun the trace with a flag for each one. What you want in debugging is a tool for exploring, refining, etc., but strace can make this difficult.

Enter strace-ui, which turns strace into an interactive terminal UI:

strace-ui assigns short IDs to PIDs to make them easier to scan, formats structs, and renders buffers as hexdumps instead of strings. It has some other nice features that you can’t see in the screenshot:

Ian Henry , a dev here, made strace-ui to scratch his own itch. In 2017, he’d gone looking for such a tool but never found it. Having had experience building interactive terminal UIs (including in OCaml, using lambda_term), he knew how difficult and unpleasant it could be. The idea percolated over the years, never feeling worth it, until recently when a few forces converged to make terminal UI development actually kind of delightful.

Bonsai, a powerful framework for reactive UIs