It has been established that hydrophobicity, hydrogen bonding, electrostatic attraction, halogen bonding and coordination all can be utilized to stabilize the folding and/or helicity of aromatic macromolecules and supramolecular systems. The resulting aromatic helical tubes possess defined diameters and tunable depth and can be used as synthetic receptors for recognizing or encapsulating a variety of guest species, achieving chirality induction and transfer, promoting organic transformations, and as artificial channels for transmembrane transport. This review highlights the advance in the construction of such family of macromolecular and supramolecular tubes from aromatic segments and their important functions. In the first section, we introduce the background of the formation of tubular structures from different strategies and the features of the supramolecular and macromolecular approaches. We then highlight the formation of molecular tubes from various oligomeric molecules with aromatic amide, hydrazide, triazole and ethyne repeat segments. In the following section, we describe the use of polymeric backbones with the above repeat segments. The self-assembly strategy for the formation of supramolecular tubes is then summarized in another section. In particular, the utility of hydrogen bonding, halogen bonding and coordination interactions has been described. When available, the functions of the tubular structures are briefly presented. In the last section, we discuss the synthetic challenges for the formation of long macromolecular tubes and the new potential applications of this family of structurally unique structures.