Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 299 posts

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#51
post #12

https://github.com/jonas/tig is one of the first things I install on a new dev machine. It's a really nice UI for staging files or hunks. Since it's just a companion to the git CLI, it feels much more focused than full-blown git GUIs, and doesn't do anything magical.

Absolutely one of the best TUIs for sure.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#52

These certainly aren't forgotten, but I like: * `ranger` file manager: https://ranger.github.io/ * `ncdu` for visualising disk usage: https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu * `htop` process monitor: https://htop.dev/ I just find them very intuitive, and information-dense while not being overwhelming.

Some alternatives:

* `vifm` file manager, more powerful and performant than ranger, for those who lean towards vim keybindings: https://vifm.info/gallery.shtml

* `btop` process monitor, for those who like eye candy: https://github.com/aristocratos/btop?tab=readme-ov-file#main...

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#53
post #8

The other day I found many TUI tools on a site called Terminal Trove: https://terminaltrove.com/ And it also features a great list of them here that many might not have heard of. https://terminaltrove.com/list/ For example trippy and nvtop look very nice for TUIs and other 'top' based tools they have listed there. https://terminaltrove.com/categories/top/ https://terminaltrove.com/trippy/ https://terminaltrove.com/nv…

The extra convenient part is that the default installation instructions are for everyone's favourite, snap.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#54

Well you have the MS-DOS era Borland tools. Someone took the time to rewrite it as a cross-platform open source library: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision Edit: Not a rewrite, but a port. See comments below.

IBM Topview had a certain charm too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#55
I absolutely love visidata : https://www.visidata.org

It’s a data exploration tool packed with features, but my regular use case is to just pipe some json into it to get a table view; it lets you easily explode nested fields into separate columns which I find tremendously helpful when digging

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#56
Don't know how interesting it is, but I used the David Readme Compiler a lot in the past to create simple executable readme to accompany software and as a small knowledge base.

It created a simple dialog-based menu that allow to explore topic and search through them (and edit and print). I think it used Turbo-Vision, but I may be misremembering.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#57
I personally love TUI software, you don't have to worry about GUI toolkits, mouse focused interaction, you can run them remotely over SSH, they're often composable, and composability is much easier, and who doesn't like the hackerman aesthetic?

Some things I don't like about modern TUIs is developers getting away from the purpose of them, portability. Often you'll find really beautiful TUIs that require installation of custom fonts for icons and other overcomplicated stuff like that. They can be nice, but generally they sacrifice the practical benefit to a significant degree.

One I discovered yesterday, not really a TUI, more of a shell but still, extremely powerful, is kalc https://github.com/bgkillas/kalc which is a complete scientific and graphing calculator in the terminal. It depends on gnuplot for graphing, which is unfortunate since it is a GUI program, but there we go with composability again! It's fine and works and does what it needs to, so not really a big deal I guess.

I also use Helix editor and sc-im daily.

To find more:

https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

https://github.com/toolleeo/cli-apps

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#60
post #48
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Norton Commander was the original product (for MS DOS), Midnight Commander is its open-source cross-platform clone. FAR Manager is another notable TUI clone of NC. Windows Commander/Total Commander are also NC clones, but implemented as GUI instead of TUI. NC was one of the most convenient UIs for managing files, it’s a pity none of the major operating systems adopted this style for their default file manag…

Volkov Commander should get an honorable mention here, it is a tiny reimplementation of the NC interface. On the FAR Manager level of complexity DOS Navigator is also notable.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN