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Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

textualize.io

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Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

#21

Post by Neywiny »

emrah wrote: post #3

> The first trick is "overwrite, don't clear" This is how games were written back in the day before DirectX was a thing. You'd write directly to the frame buffer and instead of clearing and redrawing, you'd redraw what changed and what was around and under it (because there was no time to refresh the entire view in time in addition to everything else you need to do)

I learned this from ComputerCraft programming. It's become applicable many times since then, occasionally professionally. But, the ability to tell the terminal when it's starting/done a frame is a lot more powerful IMO.

Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

#24

Post by willm »

miki123211 wrote: post #19

As a screen reader user, reading this post makes me want to scream. If you care about accessibility even one bit, for the love of god, please, don't use any of the features this post mentions. Things like animation or unicode diagrams break screen readers in horrible ways.

I would love to improve support accessibility for TUIs. Textual internally keeps a browser like DOM structure, which means it could in theory offer browser-like support for screen readers while keeping all the features offered to sighted user. But it would require a protocol to allow the app to send structured information so that the screen reader has more to work with than a matrix of characters. AFAIK this doesn't exist.

The most promising way forward for accessibility is the web support for Textual. It would be possible for the app to work with the browser to make highly accessible TUIs.

Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

#25

Post by dualogy »

lynx23 wrote: post #12

Anyone old and naiv enough to share this observation: Almost everything I looked at after TurboVision was inspired, but actually not really finished. Once you take the toolkit for a ride, you realize its kind of cute but unfinished. Maybe another way of looking at this is to call many of the TUI frameworks I say "opinionated", whatever that exactly means. I am likely just dense and uncreative, but the truth is, when…

I get what Turbo Vision is (was), but what's that B800 thing? Surely you aren't talking about a Celeron processor? Seems tricky to google, also no Wiki page on that. You got me curious, plz spill it! =)

Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

#26

Post by willm »

mikkelam wrote: post #23

Why do software engineers care so much about TUI? I really don't get it. I love a good command line program. But TUI just doesn't appeal to me.

Each to their own. But running apps over SSH is a big plus. And some folk, like myself, enjoy the snappy keyboards focused experience that perhaps GUI apps could offer, but typically don't.

Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

#27

Post by pjmlp »

mikkelam wrote: post #23

Why do software engineers care so much about TUI? I really don't get it. I love a good command line program. But TUI just doesn't appeal to me.

I guess, mainly because of nostalgia, back from the days TUIs were the only way to interact with computers.

Turbo Vision, curses and dialog were cool back in the 1990's.

Having started with computers in 1986, I really don't get the TUI fetisch, not even remote access is an issue, given X Windows, VNC, RDP, Citrix,... exist for decades.

Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

#29

Post by bogdan-lab »

This TUI looks pretty, but I cannot imagine situation, when I would actually use it and be ready to pay for it. Probably I am not living in a right environment for it. But in my experience, either people are happy with something truly minimalistic or they try to please a user with GUI right away.

For example, YouTube link in the article showed a possibility to display table with highlighting cells. Why would I need that as TUI? Probably if I want to navigate through table with highlighting active cell I would also need a bunch of other stuff and eventually I would need a proper GUI.

Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

#30

Post by anothername12 »

dualogy wrote: post #25
lynx23 wrote: post #12

Anyone old and naiv enough to share this observation: Almost everything I looked at after TurboVision was inspired, but actually not really finished. Once you take the toolkit for a ride, you realize its kind of cute but unfinished. Maybe another way of looking at this is to call many of the TUI frameworks I say "opinionated", whatever that exactly means. I am likely just dense and uncreative, but the truth is, when…

I get what Turbo Vision is (was), but what's that B800 thing? Surely you aren't talking about a Celeron processor? Seems tricky to google, also no Wiki page on that. You got me curious, plz spill it! =)

Ok I think he’s referring to 0xB800, the VGA text buffer segment in real mode.
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