All plaintext bullshit should be eradicated. Fucking useless as a medium when displaying and handling complex tasks.
Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
51–60 of 172 posts
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for…
But why? You easily have 4k pixels, why use a tiny subset of those in a very inefficient way? We have proper hardware to make a bunch of these computations actually fast, and yet we should stuck with drawing relatively expensive text everywhere? If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind (though mostly as a guideline, it doesn't fit every workflow), but you can do that with a proper GUI just as we…
> If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind
This is a confusing concession. Of course we love TUIs because of the UX, what other reason is there?
Constraint breeds consistency and consistency breeds coherence.
Take 1,000 random TUI designers and 1,000 random GUI designers and plot the variations between them (use any method you like)—the TUI designers will be more tightly clustered together because the TUI interface constrains what's reasonable.
Yes of course you CAN recreate TUI-like UX in a GUI, that's not the issue. People don't. In a TUI they must. I like that UX and like that if I seek out a TUI for whatever thing I want to do, I'm highly likely to find a UX that I enjoy. Whereas with GUIs it's a crapshoot. That's it.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#53[flagged]
I think the real limit of plain text is pretty obvious: you cannot embed pictures in it.
It’s like SMS vs MMS or modern chat. With pure text, you can at best add a link to a picture (which could get rotten or inaccessible for other reasons), but you cannot directly graphical content.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#54All plaintext bullshit should be eradicated. Fucking useless as a medium when displaying and handling complex tasks.
[deleted]
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#55[flagged]
Readability is certainly a limit. JSON and XML are unreadable in their usual single-line transport form, and often even when pretty-printed. XML signatures break upon reformatting, so you also can’t just do it blindly.
Part of the lowest common denominator are the (printable) ASCII characters. If you ever opened a text file mostly consisting of a script you’re not familiar with, it might as well have been binary. Add to that right-to-left languages where you can’t even be sure which element follows which without knowing the scripts.
It’s “good enough” for many purposes, but it’s important to keep in mind the limitations.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for…
But why? You easily have 4k pixels, why use a tiny subset of those in a very inefficient way? We have proper hardware to make a bunch of these computations actually fast, and yet we should stuck with drawing relatively expensive text everywhere? If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind (though mostly as a guideline, it doesn't fit every workflow), but you can do that with a proper GUI just as we…
The UX is the point.
When you are "drawing text everywhere", you end up not having to draw all that much text. 3d models have more and more polygons as graphics cards improve, but the 80x24 standard persists for terminals (and UX is better for it). And I'm not even that convinced of "relatively expensive". Grokking UTF-8 and finding grapheme cluster boundaries has a lot of business logic, but it isn't really that hard. And unless you're dealing with Indic or Arabic scripts that defy a reasonable monospace presentation, you can just cache the composed glyphs.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#57[flagged]
I think the real limit of plain text is pretty obvious: you cannot embed pictures in it. It’s like SMS vs MMS or modern chat. With pure text, you can at best add a link to a picture (which could get rotten or inaccessible for other reasons), but you cannot directly graphical content.
Sure you can:
data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODdhMAAwAPAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAMAAw AAAC8IyPqcvt3wCcDkiLc7C0qwyGHhSWpjQu5yqmCYsapyuvUUlvONmOZtfzgFz ByTB10QgxOR0TqBQejhRNzOfkVJ+5YiUqrXF5Y5lKh/DeuNcP5yLWGsEbtLiOSp a/TPg7JpJHxyendzWTBfX0cxOnKPjgBzi4diinWGdkF8kjdfnycQZXZeYGejmJl ZeGl9i2icVqaNVailT6F5iJ90m6mvuTS4OK05M0vDk0Q4XUtwvKOzrcd3iq9uis F81M1OIcR7lEewwcLp7tuNNkM3uNna3F2JQFo97Vriy/Xl4/f1cf5VWzXyym7PH hhx4dbgYKAAA7
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for…
I hope it’s inevitable. Most users’ computing workloads by far are text oriented. The terminal is capable of flexbox now. Current GUIs create massive complexity and power draw relative to their value. Over a long enough arc, economic inefficiency is doomed.
> The terminal is capable of flexbox now.
You mean like https://silvery.dev/examples/layout.html ? This is definitely not a UI development paradigm I would have expected to see.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#59Couldn't help riffing off on a tangent from the title (since the article is about diagramming tools)... Dylan Beattie has a thought-provoking presentation for anyone who believes that "plain text" is a simple / solid substrate for computing: "There's no such thing as plain text" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/theres-no-such-thing-as... (you'll find many videos from different conferences)
Nice. I've used the phrase before, with the vague notion that a proper talk must already exist.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for…
But why? You easily have 4k pixels, why use a tiny subset of those in a very inefficient way? We have proper hardware to make a bunch of these computations actually fast, and yet we should stuck with drawing relatively expensive text everywhere? If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind (though mostly as a guideline, it doesn't fit every workflow), but you can do that with a proper GUI just as we…
I'm curious: Do you have a nice set of GUI applications that come with the UX you'd expect of TUIs?
(I'm not actually sure what the UX of TUIs is I love so much. Relative simplicity / focus on core features? Uff, notepad wins this one on vim. Fast startup times? I use gomuks, that takes a minute for the initial sync. No mouse? Moving around in TUI text editors with hjkl is slow. I either jump where I want to go with search or use the mouse. Lightness over SSH/network is the only thing I can't come up with a counterexample for.)