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Why TUIs are back

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Re: Why TUIs are back

#41

Post by mbreese »

slopinthebag wrote: post #4

I think TUI's are popular because they're easier to make than a GUI. They are much more constrained. A TUI is basically a wire frame with some colours, whereas with a GUI the wireframe is only the first step.

Are you sure about that? Most GUI toolkits have things so wired up that it’s trivial to get a small app running. The point is to get a dev up and running as quickly as possible (even if there is a lot of magic involved). If you’re okay with the defaults, it ca be very quick to get a GUI up and running.

In contrast, most TUI toolkits generally require the developer to wire things up manually. Maximum developer flexibility, but with a decent learning curve. Having an LLM available to handle the initial wiring definitely speeds things up.

I know I had a few long lasting bugs with a TUI I wrote years ago that Claude was able to find the fix for pretty quickly. These were bugs that weren’t obvious to me, partially due to the arcane nature of working within a TUI.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#42

Post by Ekaros »

dlivingston wrote: post #39
tptacek wrote: post #30

The tide is going to turn on this in the second half of 2026. There have always been nerds who just love TUIs, and still read their email in Mutt. But I think the subtext of this article is right, that TUIs are back because of how much of a pain UI development is. But that's changed drastically in the last few months. I spent the weekend doing SwiftUI stuff with Claude, with a lot of success. It's going to get much e…

That still doesn't address the root of the problem, which is that TUIs and Electron apps are write-once, run-anywhere, while native GUI dev is insanely fragmented. I mean, I guess that's more or less just a summary of the blog post, but it's true. And it will remain true until the fragmentation ends, and the fragmentation won't end until Microsoft gets its act together and ships their version of SwiftUI so that some…

Why not instead have Linux just run Win32 applications?

Re: Why TUIs are back

#44

Post by dlivingston »

schmorptron wrote: post #2

I think part of it is also that we're able to still LARP as full developers of complex systems while vibe coding by seeing an interface that makes us look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times

I mean, I guess there's that novelty for the first few years of your career. I've been doing this a decade. I don't care about looking and feeling like a l33t h4xx0r and I doubt my peers do either.

TUIs just solve the right problems in the same world we're already working in - the terminal. That they're fast to launch and terminals have modern features like rich color and mouse support just adds to that.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#45

Post by bbkane »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

Because nobody is investing in native UI development. Electron is proof that if there were a simple to use GUI stack that companies would adopt it.

Contrary to what the article says ("but Google gave up on the project before a real product was launched"), I think Flutter work continues and adoption is increasing

Re: Why TUIs are back

#46

Post by mr_mitm »

cassepipe wrote: post #37

> The hardcore, moved to vim or emacs, trading immediate feedback and higher usability for the steepest learning curve I’ve seen The only hard part about vim is to be forced to strecth the finger up to Escape for what is essentially the most essential function in a modal editor: Going back to command mode. The ideal workflow is do a quick edit and go back to command ("normal") mode instantly. The fact that Escape is…

Unfortunately, remapping escape to caps lock can lead to serious friction if you have to work with different laptops a lot, like I do. The muscle memory gets in the way a lot.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#47

Post by llbbdd »

ohnei wrote: post #19

The TUIs I've looked at seem to be largely NPM dependent? Bizarre that agents apparently don't have time to rewrite themselves in something that isn't a security tire fire. It kind of makes me assume that all this agents taking over stuff is from people working at garbage-pivot-garbage startups that don't really have to worry about any consequences but not being fast enough.

Return to the halcyon security era of curl piped into bash

Re: Why TUIs are back

#48

Post by dlivingston »

Ekaros wrote: post #42
dlivingston wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn't address the root of the problem, which is that TUIs and Electron apps are write-once, run-anywhere, while native GUI dev is insanely fragmented. I mean, I guess that's more or less just a summary of the blog post, but it's true. And it will remain true until the fragmentation ends, and the fragmentation won't end until Microsoft gets its act together and ships their version of SwiftUI so that some…

Why not instead have Linux just run Win32 applications?

That's really not a solution. You're not targeting the host OS for that, which instantly kills that approach for everything other than "we need this to run on Linux and don't care how." You're shipping all of WINE with it. You're sticking out like a sore thumb with Win32 widgets next to the rest of your GTK apps. Etc etc etc.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#49

Post by onemoresoop »

Suro wrote: post #40
bartread wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times I feel seen. I also think there’s a certain element of reacting against absolutely everything becoming a bloated electron app. I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.

Considering the insane memory consumption of claude code running in my terminal, electron was never really the problem, bad software was the culprit all along.

Can’t say that electron does not encourage bad software, quite the opposite

Re: Why TUIs are back

#50

Post by slopinthebag »

mbreese wrote: post #41
slopinthebag wrote: post #4

I think TUI's are popular because they're easier to make than a GUI. They are much more constrained. A TUI is basically a wire frame with some colours, whereas with a GUI the wireframe is only the first step.

Are you sure about that? Most GUI toolkits have things so wired up that it’s trivial to get a small app running. The point is to get a dev up and running as quickly as possible (even if there is a lot of magic involved). If you’re okay with the defaults, it ca be very quick to get a GUI up and running. In contrast, most TUI toolkits generally require the developer to wire things up manually. Maximum developer flexibi…

Idk, it's pretty trivial to set up a TUI with bubbletea or ratatui, and I assume other languages have similar libraries.
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