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A year of building for the terminal

textual.textualize.io

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Re: A year of building for the terminal

#81

Post by davepdotorg »

carapace wrote: post #79
davepdotorg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long ago did you check the documentation? As of October this year the first full set of docs were published, with more to come: https://textual.textualize.io/

I just checked my browser history and my latest visit was October 1st. I must have just missed it.

Aye, that’ll be it then. The docs went live towards the end of October, with the release of 0.2.0 (which was a huge change over 0.1, adding the whole CSS approach). If you do decide to dip back by for a look you should hopefully find the documentation covers a lot now, with a really rich tutorial. Still plenty to add of course, it’s a work in progress, but I think we’re doing good for docs now.

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#82

Post by troyvit »

kjcondon wrote: post #6

This is an interesting framework, it's refreshing in that you don't need to bootstrap a whole web browser (electron) to build a user interface. I don't really see it's use case though, mostly cli is used for either: A) Ability to run in automated environments (e.g CI) - think aws cli B) Interop, think piping data from grep to xargs C) Hacking - writing a script quick and dirty to just get a job done I'd have thought…

I worked for a company that needed a bunch of tools developed quickly for internal support and implementation teams. We didn't have the authority or the time to build many web apps but it was super easy to set up a git repo with a bunch of cli apps for the teams to use. Everybody picked it up pretty quickly and felt pretty cool using the terminal to accomplish awesome things.

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#85

Post by dlqx »

To be honest I am wondering what these people did not understand about terminals?

A terminal is not meant to resemble graphical UIs with all those whistles and bells! Looks like I am the only one who is wondering :D ;)

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#86

Post by maydup-nem »

funklute wrote: post #64
distcs wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is your argument that no one should create TUI applications except within Emacs? Not at all. I said in my original comment that I am all for creating TUI applications. And also that the work done by Textual is nothing short of impressive. What I ask here is why new users are averse to using Emacs+packages when they are ready to put similar time investment in learning TUI applications which also come with their own…

Arguably, the terminal is more general. Pretty much every developer will at some point have significant interactions with a terminal. The same cannot be said for emacs. On top of that, the terminal is a more general-purpose tool than emacs, and it is much less opinionated than emacs (each TUI tends instead to do their own thing, for good or bad). I think the bottomline is that it's quite natural to delve into TUIs, w…

> general

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#87

Post by fragmede »

dlqx wrote: post #85

To be honest I am wondering what these people did not understand about terminals? A terminal is not meant to resemble graphical UIs with all those whistles and bells! Looks like I am the only one who is wondering :D ;)

Ugh no. Just because choose to use a keyboard-based interface doesn't mean I don't want things like colors and graphics.

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#88

Post by carapace »

davepdotorg wrote: post #81
carapace wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked my browser history and my latest visit was October 1st. I must have just missed it.

Aye, that’ll be it then. The docs went live towards the end of October, with the release of 0.2.0 (which was a huge change over 0.1, adding the whole CSS approach). If you do decide to dip back by for a look you should hopefully find the documentation covers a lot now, with a really rich tutorial. Still plenty to add of course, it’s a work in progress, but I think we’re doing good for docs now.

I hate to sound negative but I'm still going to use ncurses.

I'm not trying to slight Textualize (or any of the other fine TUI systems) when I say that, to me, they all seem like "fun toys". What I mean is that ncurses covers the terminal abstraction (glorified turd-polished teletype machine, literally an electric typewriter) and provides all the building blocks that make sense to provide. All these TUI projects then add an additional abstraction layer to essentially add a GUI toolkit on top.

For my use case, it was more work to learn and use the additional abstractions than it was to implement the behaviour I wanted in ncurses. And this was true for every TUI system I tried, in every language I tried (OCaml, C, Nim, Python).

The conclusion I came to was that TUI systems are essentially nerd toys (I mean that in an affectionate way), one gets "nerd-sniped" into making a TUI system and then sometimes it becomes a "real project" (Textualize has VC money?) but in ten or twenty years... ncurses will still be there, eh?

(My lil tui side-quest got started when a terminal text editor project went by here on HN and I thought, "How hard could it be...?" Nerd-sniped by a classic: write your own text editor. The thing that saved me was that, as I said, I bounced off of the TUI sub-universe into the arms of ncurses, and then I realized that all my design ideas were basically vim, and that snapped me out of it. Whew! Close call!)

From my POV the important thing is that the Textualize folks are having fun. (I don't mean that in a snark way, I'm sincere!)

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#89

Post by ibz »

dlqx wrote: post #85

To be honest I am wondering what these people did not understand about terminals? A terminal is not meant to resemble graphical UIs with all those whistles and bells! Looks like I am the only one who is wondering :D ;)

What is a terminal meant to do then and who says that?

Actually I would argue that graphical UIs copied terminal UIs that existed first and in some cases they did not catch up even as of now. See file managers. There is Total Commander on Windows, which managed to surpass the old Midnight Commander in functionality and ease of use, but that's about it. Very hard to find a decent file manager on Linux or OSX that comes even close to mc.

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#90

Post by ibz »

carapace wrote: post #88
davepdotorg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aye, that’ll be it then. The docs went live towards the end of October, with the release of 0.2.0 (which was a huge change over 0.1, adding the whole CSS approach). If you do decide to dip back by for a look you should hopefully find the documentation covers a lot now, with a really rich tutorial. Still plenty to add of course, it’s a work in progress, but I think we’re doing good for docs now.

I hate to sound negative but I'm still going to use ncurses. I'm not trying to slight Textualize (or any of the other fine TUI systems) when I say that, to me, they all seem like "fun toys". What I mean is that ncurses covers the terminal abstraction (glorified turd-polished teletype machine, literally an electric typewriter) and provides all the building blocks that make sense to provide. All these TUI projects then…

Another plus I see with ncurses: you can use the same abstractions from any language that has bindings to the C libraries.

For these new-fangled frameworks though... Like Textualize? You have to use Python. Fancy Golang? You have to go with Glamour. Rust fan? Wait a couple of months and there will be something equally awesome.

They are all awesome except they are sort of "competing standards" and you never know how long they will be maintained in the future. Whereas ncurses works in every language and will always be around.

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