Thulium-doped pulsed fiber lasers have attracted considerable interests as novel laser source, due to their wide applications in eye-safe lidar, laser medical system, optoelectronic countermeasure and special material processing. The research and development on ultrafast thulium-doped fiber laser at 2 μm wavelength are classified, which include the technical approach of the ultrafast thuliun doped pulse output, the novel saturable absorbers of passive mode-locking, the characteristics of thulium-doped passively mode-locked fiber laser output, and the development of high power thulium-doped ultrafast pulse amplifier. Up to now, several main mode-locked techniques, such as actively mode-locking, nonlinear polarization evolution, saturable absorber, and nonlinear amplifier loop mirror have been used to achieve ultrashort laser pulses in thulium-doped fiber lasers. The saturable absorber material mainly include semiconductor, carbon nanotubes, graphene and graphene oxide. The most recent work shows that 80 W average power at 1963 nm has been obtained in a three-stage fiber amplifier with pulse width of 20 ps. The prospect of further development and application of such ultrafast laser sources is discussed in the last part of the article.