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Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

textual.textualize.io

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Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#91

Post by masfuerte »

cout wrote: post #89
masfuerte wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type-ahead works fine with single-threaded GUIs. It was rock solid in Windows 3.1. It worked in nearly all win32 apps because hardly anyone used threads other than for background tasks. But it's broken in most modern UI toolkits and on the web.

I'm dumbfounded when I type faster than the web browser can keep up and see the characters on the screen in a different order than I typed them.

I do an online sudoku which sometimes processes the numbers and arrow keys out of order. I feel like I'm being gaslit.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#92

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

rollcat wrote: post #31
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I think you're missing is that a browser is kind of a clunky dependency. It really wants you to use it for a certain kind of thing and although they can be tricked into doing other things, you and your users are always going to feel a bit of pressure to conform to the norms of the modern web. So if you're trying to avoid the mess that is the web these days, a TUI is really your whole "everything else"…

There is an easy way to write GUI apps that both look good and do not boil down to the lowest common denominator of 80s state-of-the-art: use something like SDL/GLFW, with an immediate mode UI toolkit on top. Lagrange ( https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ ) is a beautiful app that (despite my ideological purism in favoring more "native" solutions) I find perfectly usable and pleasant to use.

I'll look into these things, thank you.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#93

Post by ploum »

anthk wrote: post #81
ploum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, I’m also a fan of CLI. That’s why I developed a CLI brower ( https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/ ). When reading the title, I clicked hoping to see some alternatives or innovative solution to browse the web from a terminal. Turns out it’s the opposite : putting a terminal in a web browser.

Offpunk needs an option to open images with sxiv instead of displaying them inline.

That option exists.

When displaying an image, simply type "open" to open with an external program.

By default, it uses xdg-open but you can configure it in offpunk with:

> handler image/* sxiv %s

note that "open" works also with pages and will open the cached html pages in your browser. If you want to open the original page use "open url"

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#94

Post by c0balt »

nine_k wrote: post #60
bArray wrote: post #3

The idea is pretty cool, but I'm unsure of the mix of TUI and animation. Once you start going down the path of animations, layout, fonts, etc, you start just reinventing the web - but with extra steps. Personally I would cut complex animations (i.e. sub-character) and only have a single size monospace font. I would rip out CSS and go for maximum compatibility. (If something exists like that, please let me know!) Anot…

You can't cut of all the CSS; you likely want to honor things like `display: none`, and also colors, and preferably bold, italic, and underline.

Tbh this can all be covered by ANSI escape codes. They aren't very expressive or compasable, in comparison to CSS but adequate for most TUI programms. And even the DX around them is okay-ish in textual and other TUI frameworks.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#95

Post by rollcat »

cxr wrote: post #85
rollcat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want something keyboard driven and command focused rather than UI element focused. I think we are in more agreement than you might suspect. Command-driven operation is how I tell a good UI from a poor UI. Good interfaces are intuitive for beginners and provide a smooth learning curve to mastery. Good way to get there is for the interface to remain simple and consistent on the surface, but unravel more specialized…

> It's all the things that make macOS UI so good Mac OS doesn't have access keys for the menu bar. Either someone assigns a keyboard shortcut, which you can use, or you have to use the key combo that focuses the menu bar and then arrow through the menus. The first time I got a Mac, I thought this was insane. When I sold my MacBook years later, I still thought it was insane, because it is. In contrast, the IBM Common…

> Mac OS doesn't have access keys for the menu bar. Either someone assigns a keyboard shortcut, which you can use, or you have to use the key combo that focuses the menu bar and then arrow through the menus.

Try Cmd+Shift+/ (aka Cmd+?) and typing a few letters of the command you want to invoke. It's pretty much the same mechanism that Emacs uses (C-x followed by the command name).

I'll admit it's not very discoverable.

> In contrast, the IBM Common User Access guidelines established that you can press Alt plus another key indicated by an underlined letter associated with a given menu option in order to open/select that option

First, Macs don't have an "Alt" key ;) But more importantly, CUA dates back to 1987, which is predated by the original 1984 Macintosh - which by that time already had established quite a few conventions of its own. I wouldn't blame it on Apple that they've stuck with their own conventions, their OS is arguably the most consistent one on the market thanks to that. Some people (hi) greatly value that consistency.

I think it could be argued either way about which convention is better, I'd say it boils down to preference.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#96

Post by bottom999mottob »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #73

This looks cool. How long would it take me to learn and get proficient with something like this? I would use it for email, JIRA tickets, reading github code, using the github/gitlab UI (as a TUI). Maybe even some google sheets. As I type this I now realize most of this is probably not possible :(

I've been using it to build a dashboard for a web scraper with postgresql backend. Thing's it's helped with that could help you 1. Formatting tables of json from API specs 2. Keep track of growing database tables 3. Have buttons to start tasks queues

Things I've noticed are the debugging and logging experience are pretty good. You could have multiple processes dumping to different log files and grepping those.

There's a lot of formatting you can do with Python and the sister library Rich.

Have spent about 12 hours on it and it's much easier to get a UI running than say learning a flavor of the month JavaScript framework.

0: https://developer.atlassian.com/server/jira/platform/jira-re...

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#97

Post by rewgs »

rollcat wrote: post #2

TUI is just a thinly disguised GUI. I mean it's pretty cool what they've done, but if it's effectively just an alternative graphical frontend (that happens to run in a terminal emulator), well I guess someone out there has a use case where they need to run this over an SSH session? Personally I find CLI ( not TUI) and/or client libraries a much more attractive proposition; otherwise a native application, that uses pr…

> I guess someone out there has a use case where they need to run this over an SSH session?

Raises hand.

I write a lot of internal tools for musicians (primarily film composers), many of which are primarily local but will be web-based once I put together the rest of the pieces of the pipeline. Being able to run the same interface as a local desktop app, or as a web app, or over an SSH connection, is a huge selling point to me.

Plus, I just honestly love the look. It's clean and simple with high information density. Totally my cup of tea.

IMO Textual/Rich is one of the coolest projects to come out in recent years.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#98

Post by skimdesk »

I've been developing a websocket server that lets multiple users connect to the same command-line app.

I wrote a short example [1] that exposes a TUI game on the web. In theory, hot-seat terminal games should be playable over the web with this.

My current challenge has been around refreshing the screen for late joiners. I need to save some of the ANSI escape history and replay it to clients, or ask the application to redraw itself. If anyone has ideas on how to approach this i'm all ears.

[1] https://www.scalesocket.org/man/examples/terminal

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#99

Post by snthpy »

bArray wrote: post #3

The idea is pretty cool, but I'm unsure of the mix of TUI and animation. Once you start going down the path of animations, layout, fonts, etc, you start just reinventing the web - but with extra steps. Personally I would cut complex animations (i.e. sub-character) and only have a single size monospace font. I would rip out CSS and go for maximum compatibility. (If something exists like that, please let me know!) Anot…

I like the telnet idea. I haven't used that in like 20 years. Do people still use that?

I guess it's kinda like running over ssh? Or do you mean you hit an open unprotected port (telnet) and then the app takes care of setting up the SSL connection so you don't have to worry about SSH details?

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#100

Post by [deleted] »

nine_k wrote: post #60
bArray wrote: post #3

The idea is pretty cool, but I'm unsure of the mix of TUI and animation. Once you start going down the path of animations, layout, fonts, etc, you start just reinventing the web - but with extra steps. Personally I would cut complex animations (i.e. sub-character) and only have a single size monospace font. I would rip out CSS and go for maximum compatibility. (If something exists like that, please let me know!) Anot…

You can't cut of all the CSS; you likely want to honor things like `display: none`, and also colors, and preferably bold, italic, and underline.

[deleted]
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