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Stop Making TUIs

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Re: Stop Making TUIs

#181

Post by Mesopropithecus »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #21

One of the biggest upsides of TUIs over GUIs is that I can run any number of TUI instances. Meanwhile a GUI's developer has to decide to grace me with the ability to even open more than one window. "A tabbed interface will be sufficient!" -- yay, I'll never be able to view two screens of info at the same time.

In TUI, you almost always open a new process when your start a new instance.

Pretty much all GUI frameworks I have worked with behave the same, and you have to actively create singleton behavior.

Then you have Mac OS which makes it hard two create multiple processes of a GUI app. Other OSs don't necessarily behave the same.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#182

Post by rvz »

sochowski wrote: post #96

> But there’s one of the problems with TUIs: even with a good framework, like Ratatui, Textual, or Bubbletea, you’re fighting the terminal to come asymptotically close to what every native framework does well out of the box. Scrolling and scroll targets are an obvious example. maybe the answer is... you just don't need features like scrolling? this guy is trying to fit a square peg into a circle hole

The entire article is close to rage bait and should be dismissed as such.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#184

Post by [deleted] »

jbstack wrote: post #159
curtisblaine wrote: post #55

Clickbaity title. Boring show off of vibe coded apps that only make sense to the author, disguised as think piece. This post has it all.

I found most of the article completely unreadable. I was actually beginning to wonder if the HN post had linked to the wrong article, as it had nothing to do with TUIs until the very end. It was just a long list of "look at this slop code I made" and "look, here's another one!".

[deleted]

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#185

Post by rvz »

jbstack wrote: post #159
curtisblaine wrote: post #55

Clickbaity title. Boring show off of vibe coded apps that only make sense to the author, disguised as think piece. This post has it all.

I found most of the article completely unreadable. I was actually beginning to wonder if the HN post had linked to the wrong article, as it had nothing to do with TUIs until the very end. It was just a long list of "look at this slop code I made" and "look, here's another one!".

The whole article reads as a post around jealously on the popularity of TUIs and writes a pseudo-intellectual rant about them.

While I don't use most of them, but I can see why TUIs they are popular around devs. But in this post it reads like this:

"I don't like slop TUIs because they are popular, but please look at my vibe coded slop GUIs and I like vibe coding them and you should too"

One of the worst, if not part of my top ten worst blog posts I have ever seen on this orange site and absolutely do not listen to that horrible take that the author just wrote.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#186

Post by yeodev »

I think OP is missing the point of TUIs: They kinda work everywhere. While I need to fuck around with a operation systems native UI libraries like WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK, etc. I can just build an app in the terminal and be fine with it running on almost all platforms.

I'd take TUI apps over electron apps everytime as long as the UX is good.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#187

Post by wiseowise »

jeroenhd wrote: post #175
anon7000 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To get a good terminal UX, I think the answer to this is probably to throw all that compatibility mess away and redesign a modern terminal protocol that bakes in accessibility, regions, scrolling, selection, proper keyboard, etc. Why not just… a GUI framework or layout that’s meant to be keyboard driven and information dense?

TUIs run on any OS with minor patches to support quirks, GUI frameworks need a lot of work. TUIs don't need to follow any OS guidelines, cross-platform GUIs always look bad outside of the "main" platform. If you're only targeting macOS/Windows/Gnome/KDE then the solution is easy: just grab a GUI control set and go ham. Then there's remote access: you can spawn an X11 app through X forwarding and have a terrible laggy…

> TUIs don't need to follow any OS guidelines, cross-platform GUIs always look bad outside of the "main" platform.

So because TUIs look universally bad, they're better than cross-platform GUI?

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#188

Post by intelkishan »

blooalien wrote: post #103
FabCH wrote: post #25

Counterpoint: Build more TUIs in Rust using Ratatui: https://ratatui.rs/ Why? Because just look at the examples on that page.

Or for those coding in Python there's Textual: https://textual.textualize.io/ Or for Go coders there's BubbleTea: https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea Why? Because TUI!

Yeah Textual, is pretty good. I have been building a CYOA(Choose-your-own-adventure) game using it

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#189

Post by [deleted] »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #115
orbital-decay wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not claim it (another user did), but I think your reaction captures the overall sentiment ITT, which is taking perceived status quo as some fundamental thing and defending the worse solution instead of changing the status quo. If all that energy went into perfecting GUI apps the way you want them to work, the ecosystem would have been much healthier. I've seen it in Electron already, and TUI apps are headed the…

I don't understand what you're responding to. TUI apps are multi-instance by default since the user can invoke the program in different pty sessions. The developer would have to actively fight that. GUI SDKs generally require the developer to pick a solution. And it's easier to default to the simpler solution where you have one instance, one data model, one window. Whether things might change in the future isn't rele…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#190

Post by wiseowise »

blooalien wrote: post #103
FabCH wrote: post #25

Counterpoint: Build more TUIs in Rust using Ratatui: https://ratatui.rs/ Why? Because just look at the examples on that page.

Or for those coding in Python there's Textual: https://textual.textualize.io/ Or for Go coders there's BubbleTea: https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea Why? Because TUI!

> Textual

Please, don't. One of the main benefits of TUI is being able to freely copy text, I hate opening Textual application and being dropped into this canvas like state.

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