Stop Making TUIs

I think it depends on how you work and what the application does. When I'm in a flow state I need things that are fast. GUIs, even on my relatively fast mac are not terribly fast. They take more time to start. They require more screen real-estate, and more management of same.

For something to become a GUI app (or a web-based UI) the GUI needs to offer something more valuable than a TUI can offer in terms of interaction.

I have one TUI app that wrote a while back to keep track of what I work on. It started off as a "wizard"-style UI. You choose project, then subproject, day, hours, activity and then hours and comment in a sequence of steps.

Arrow keys -> enter -> arrow keys -> enter .... -> comment -> enter

It takes about 2-3 seconds for me to do. And this is a time-sensitive task: if it isn't fast the user will not do it as often. There is a web interface to do the same thing, but the backend is slow. My TUI utility speeds that up by caching (between sessions) the things that the web UI has to look up (slowly) every time.

Then I wrote a more involved UI for it that "looks more like an application". Result? Now we were up to 15-20 seconds of interacting. Oh year it could do more and it certainly looked better, but it was less efficient so I noticed that I would postpone using it to record what I was doing. Because it now had friction. Lots of it. So a couple of weeks later I just did a hard reset and went back to the wizard style, minimalist version.

I would make a web UI, but that would burn 2-3 seconds just to navigate the browser there, juggle tabs (which I have too many of already), find the right browser to open the tab in etc. Once there do I keep it for "faster access" or close the tab? Keeping it is almost always the wrong thing.

There's a reason I have perhaps 15 different tools in my garage that can attach to a given fastener size. And there's a reason for that. Not all 19mm bolts are treated the same way. Some are low torque and live in tiny spaces. Some require precise fastening torque. Some need a lot of force to come loose - some will only come loose with force and I'm okay with destroying them. This is why I have so many tools that all do essentially the same job: apply rotational force to a piece of metal that has a standardized interface.

Similar tasks are not always best solved with the same tool because the context and the details do matter. Same goes for UIs. There are some things TUIs are very good at. Not least portability and remote usability.

I like TUIs a lot and I use a TUI instead of a GUI as long as there is one available, but please note the main point of the post, the very last sentence

> I barely think about these things as “apps” (I have no intention to distribute them). They’re artifacts of me making my computer do stuff for me, the way I want it to. As a Unix nerd, I’ve always been able to do this, in the language of the command line. Now, it’s just as easy to do that kind of work with graphical interfaces.

And so the author (second sentence of the post)

> I built my first serious Mac application a few months ago, and since then I’ve built more native UI thingies than in my entire career prior to that.

I still build my personal stuff either for the command line (not even TUIs) or in a HTML page but I can see the point of creating a native app. Unfortunately there are some drawbacks: I would have to create the app for GNOME Debian and for Android, while a web app runs on both, and I would have to go all in on vibe coding because my last serious GUI programming has been in the 90s with Motif. The latter point is more or less the point of the author (the LLM does it for you) but it means that programming personal stuff will cost money paid to the LLMs companies. More and more money at each price hike and the multi thousand dollars box to run local models only makes the expense happen immediately instead of diluting over a long period.

If you want to live only in the terminal, you can also use one of the text-based browsers [1] instead of Chrome, Firefox, etc. browsh [2] can also play YouTube videos if you'd like.

You can also just use the system console with tmux or GNU screen if you absolutely don't want any graphics at all.

The TUI programs usually do not consume a lot of resources. They are also very fast and optimized for keyboard-only navigation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_web_browser [2] https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh

I like TUIs, and I chose to build e.g. https://taskusanakirja.com/ as a TUI for a couple of reasons, some of which are in this article and some not. Cross platform compatibility was a big one since at the time I started building it I didn't actually have a Windows or Mac machine handy to test this out.

One thing I think which is overlooked is the raw feeling of speed a good TUI can give you. The lowest grade consumer laptop could probably download my little dictionary program and still get true search-on-keystroke performance, because there is virtually nothing slowing down that path, no animations, no nothing. Now most of that comes down to the data structures involved and making sure nothing ever has to go over a network, but I still appreciate the sheer simplicity of the approach.

It's also nice to know that I can probably recompile this same exact code 50 years from now and still get it to run exactly as intended, since GUI frameworks have waxed and wanted in popularity, but terminals truly don't seem to be going anywhere.

Why this is preferable? I would rather have the apps I use represented as a list of apps in my system (drawing on a couple of decades of established UX conventions for how they are displayed and how I can interact with them), the web content I'm reading represented as tabs in my browser, and my terminal sessions represented in my terminal. You present the destruction of this simple separation of concerns as a benefit, but don't explain why it is one.