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Why TUIs are back

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Re: Why TUIs are back

#391

Post by mghackerlady »

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…

From the emacs perspective, it's barely even a learning curve. If you want to use the default keybinds it takes maybe a day to get used to them (probably less on mac since it uses some of them by default already) and GNU emacs has a very nice CUA mode. Hell, if for some reason you like vi keybinds and don't use vi and don't want to use vi, emacs has a pretty good vi mode

Re: Why TUIs are back

#392

Post by allknowingfrog »

qudat wrote: post #62

I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code, everything else is background noise compared to it. What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required. It's a major reason why I enjoy hacking on https://pico.sh -- deploying the TUI requires zero user invol…

I got excited about TUIs when I was exposed to the Bubble Tea framework for Go. I'm sure that Claude has accelerated the trend, but interesting things were already happening years ago.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#393

Post by mghackerlady »

serial_dev wrote: post #219
bbkane wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The article (as I read it) says that Google gave up on the new operating system (where Flutter would have been the default UI toolkit). I’m not sure if Google actually already gave up on Fuchsia, I’d be surprised if the work actually stopped, but it’s clear now that it will not be a panacea and if it will ever get released and gets some traction, it’s still like a decade away from becoming a major OS.

They laid off most of the people on the Fuchsia team so it isn't getting as much work, but Fuchsia is used on their nest stuff iirc

Re: Why TUIs are back

#394

Post by mghackerlady »

skydhash wrote: post #252
thayne wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> cross platform That's one word that should never been used in an design meeting. None of the GUI I've used has managed to do this right. Even Emacs and Firefox. The platform are totally different (and in the case of Linux/Unix, there's a lot of different HIG competing). So trying to be cross platform is a good illustration of the lesson in https://xkcd.com/927/ The best bet should be a core with the domain with a U…

It's not even that cross platform is necessarily bad, it's that we have so many cross platform toolkits and they compete with native ones.

I think we'd all be better off if we just declared qt the standard gui library and rid ourselves of the chaos we find ourselves in

Re: Why TUIs are back

#395

Post by perarneng »

Two advantages: - Deliver apps over remote - Superfast keyboard interaction (forced) One big disadvantages: - Limited graphics and advanced UI component support

I would say the optimal UI is a Keyboard driven normal Desktop app. An app that can take full advantage of graphics elements of a desktop app but is lightning fast to interact with thanks to that it's keyboard driven. Very few people build apps like that though. Sure there are keyboard hints in many apps but they are usually not 100% guaranteed to cover all cases and are sometimes an afterthought.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#397

Post by bmitc »

qudat wrote: post #62

I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code, everything else is background noise compared to it. What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required. It's a major reason why I enjoy hacking on https://pico.sh -- deploying the TUI requires zero user invol…

> What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH.

This echoes my main interest in TUIs. Otherwise, I greatly prefer a good desktop application.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#398

Post by mghackerlady »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #157

It's nuts that software developers are allowed to design user interfaces at all. They're incapable of making a user interface that isn't text. It's like if plumbers designed houses, they'd make all the floors slope downward, because that's the easiest way for pipes to run. Oh we need multiple windows we can move around/resize? Let's make them text windows. We want people to be able to quickly select options? Yeah mak…

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have material and (to some extent) adwaita which look pretty but are absolutely useless for anything more complex than app style development or maybe a file manager

Re: Why TUIs are back

#399

Post by wren6991 »

alex_young wrote: post #385
wren6991 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CLI is "run a command, get output, drop you back at your shell prompt". TUI is a full-screen interface inside the terminal which you stay inside of, no longer interacting with your shell.

I think that’s what we used to call a program. Things like vi and wordstar seem like they’d qualify.

Yes I agree, something like vi or GNU nano is a great example of a TUI. The meaning is drifting a bit but I think the distinction is useful: a CLI program is one that you can invoke from a Makefile.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#400

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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