171–180 of 443 posts
Can someone who is more knowledgeable about these help compare and contrast these three texts a bit?
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…
if ai makes native rewrites cheap, "write once run anywhere" matters a lot less. tuis stick around for dev workflows, not for shipping to users.
The best thing about TUIs is that they're so fast. They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast. There's a learning curve for the bazillion hotkeys, because all it is is hot keys, but when you have it, you just fly. I've been reverting more and more: mutt (mail), newsboat (RSS), amfora (gemini protocol), gurk (Signal), chawan (web), and even trn (Usenet). My RAM usage is tiny. Everything is quick. GUIs should ta…
> They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast. I don't know about that. The Gemini TUI takes like four full seconds to start on my machine. I have no idea what the hell it's doing. A lot of the fancy new TUIs that are coming on the crest of the current fad are hot garbage. I hate them.
> 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…
TUIs are popular because once you use a piece of software that doesn't have a poorly-written GUI library full of animations bogging it down, you don't want to go back.
It's hard to make a TUI that isn't snappy, no matter how much useless eye-candy it has.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, both wxWidgets and Qt are fine, no? GTK 2 and 3 as well (4+ is... meh). There are plenty applications using one of these (often via python bindings). I think it is more of a staffing problem. Plenty of people know web development, so you want to use those people for desktop as well. Having desktop be JS (electron) helps a lot with that.
A year ago I would have agreed with you, but now anyone can build a perfectly reasonable native app.
> 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…
You know that CTRL + [ functions same as ESC right? Sr. dev at my job told me about this a year ago and it made vim SIGNIFICANTLY more comfortable to use day to day.
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.
I don't think it is lack of investment necessarily, so much as not building the right thing. What we need is a framework that is easy to use, cross platform, open source, and ideally can be used from your programming language of choice.
There's at least Qt, GTK, umm, and, I guess Juce and wxWindows, right? Oh, I see there are more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G...
Can you explain what's deficient about the first two I mentioned?