A year of building for the terminal • Hacker News Board

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#91

Post by davepdotorg » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

jarbus wrote: post #74

I have a very specific use case: I want to have a UI interface around images generated by the kitty graphics protocol. Kitty, the terminal emulator, can render images in full resolution, which has been so helpful for viewing plots over ssh. I made a hacky ui for generating plots as I need them using prompt-toolkit, but having a proper TUI library that supports images would be so much nicer

This sort of thing is on the development roadmap. Also, some people have been building their own version of this with Textual already. Few days ago someone was showing off a Textual app they’d built that would play video - using the kitty protocol IIRC.

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#92

Post by davepdotorg » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 5:51 AM UTC

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…

We are having fun, for sure. And I suspect we’re making coding for the terminal just a wee bit more accessible for some. With Python and Textual folk can spin up a good looking app pretty quickly (see our tutorial).

Perhaps it’ll lead one or two more people down the path to eventually learning ncurses (or S-Lang, which I tended to use back in the day).

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#93

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 8:55 AM UTC

ibz wrote: post #89

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 come…

[deleted]

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#94

Post by funklute » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 11:42 AM UTC

maydup-nem wrote: post #86

funklute wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am perfectly aware what that word means, and it is exactly the word I wanted to use. Instead of being a condescending asshole, perhaps you can explain what you disagree with.

Re: A year of building for the terminal

#95

Post by jen20 » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

distcs wrote: post #60

sundarurfriend wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except all such tools assume a lot of implicit knowledge about Emacs itself, and how to navigate it, on the part of the user. Is your argument that no one should create TUI applications except within Emacs? It's pretty confusing at this point.

> 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…

> why new users are averse to using Emacs+packages when they are ready to put similar time investment in learning TUI applications

Not a new user, but because I use vim as an editor, IntelliJ as an IDE, and have precisely no interest in emacs.

On the other hand the new TUIs I use are minimal in number - k9s and damon are the extent.