All plaintext bullshit should be eradicated. Fucking useless as a medium when displaying and handling complex tasks.
Counterpoint: Adding in a custom, proprietary interpretation of your data makes your complex task more complicated.
Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
71–80 of 172 posts
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#72Earlier 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…
You could double or quadruple the number of pixels, and it wouldn't make any difference in how much information humans comprehend easily. You would be using more computing power and more memory to deliver the same amount of useful information less efficiently.
A "proper GUI" is rarely better than a well-designed TUI for communicating textual information, IMO. And the TUI constraints keep the failure-states for badly-designed UI tightly bound, unlike GUI constraints.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 becau…
> the TUI designers will be more tightly clustered together because the TUI interface constrains what's reasonable.
It constrains what’s possible, not what’s reasonable. For example, one could typically fit more text on a screen by compressing it, but most of the time, that’s not the reasonable thing to do.
I’m saying most of the time because of the existence of English Braille (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Braille#System) which uses a compression scheme to compress frequently used words and character sequences such as ‘and’ and ‘ing’ shows that, if there is enough pressure to keep texts short, humans are willing to learn fairly idiosyncratic text compression schemes.
colorforth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth) is another, way less popular example. It uses color to shorten program source code.
One could also argue Unix, which uses a widely inconsistent ad-hoc compression scheme, writing “move” as “mv”, “copy” as “cp” or “cpy” (as in “strcpy”), etc. also shows that, but I think that would be a weaker argument.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#74Earlier 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…
One of TUI advantages over GUIs (including modern web sites) - all text can be selected/copied (you may need to use modifies in some TUI). It's a bit frustrating when GUI shows text but I cannot select and copy it.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#75> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse . This is t…
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 was confused about why your comment was being downvoted; it sounded like an honest opinion... Until I got to the last sentence. You wrote a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#76The list at the top could be longer: - https://asciiflow.com/ - https://asciidraw.github.io/ Anybody know more?
https://github.com/TheoKVA/ascii-box-editor
A visual editor of UTF-8 BOX DRAWING characters, contrary to "ascii" in the name.
No server, no installation: browser-side Javascript only.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#77> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse . This is t…
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…
Apart from being wayland and a more modern look, why are you excited about omarchy and AI and you weren't with i3?
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#78Earlier 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…
What's behind this new obsession with TUIs/CLIs anyway? You always had people obsessed with i3 and vim etc but this is something different.
Get used to it, because with LLMs they're here to stay forever. (Bash will possibly be fossilized forever now, like the Latin alphabet.)
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#79> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse . This is t…
I always liked Borland's code editor (would you call it an IDE?) from that era. The one that you used in Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal, etc.
Text-mode versions of Wordperfect, Wordstar, and Lotus 1-2-3 were pretty good too.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#80> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse . This is t…
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…
Plain text coupled with non-deterministic interfaces (AI) is not great. It’s like a hybrid: some of the best of old school tech coupled with the most sketchy high tech.
I will now get to have Kafkaesque conversations with computers in MarkDown.