Stop making TUIs, stop making GUIs, and make more CLIs. Claude can read the help text and efficiently drive it directly, without needing a vision model in the loop. Then I can go outside and do more something more interesting while Claude plays computers without me.
Stop Making TUIs
201–210 of 579 posts
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#202Stop making TUIs, stop making GUIs, and make more CLIs. Claude can read the help text and efficiently drive it directly, without needing a vision model in the loop. Then I can go outside and do more something more interesting while Claude plays computers without me.
Claude (and many models, deepseek, etc) can operate a TUI just fine by reading and sending control codes to a PTY.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#203"I built my first serious Mac application" I will just stop here. No hates for macs, but your typical cli/tui software devoper is concerned about making their software run on almost anything with an actual os. As soon as I see references to specific operating systems or platform specific libraries my bullshit meter goes off. I was expecting an article about methology and tooling to develop guis, got an apple fan tell…
This is covered towards the end of the article.
I only see a bunch of references to swift (very much not portable), but I did skip the Q/A style section. I see he mentions portability, but still no mention of actual portable frameworks.
The word "macOS, "apple" or "swift" appears ~7 times each. No mention to any other GUI framework other than ...a link to the bloomberg terminal website?
I would find the title less misleading if it was "I like swift".
Let say someone, as windows or linux user, clicks on this article claiming he/she should stop "doing TUIs", what take away message should he get from it? "GUIs just looks nice but sucks you have no swiftui"? Personally, I was expecting a developer's angle on GUI programming.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which desktop? It's not true for AppKit, SwiftUI, GTK, Qt, WinUI, or Electron, and I'm not sure what's left.
What? 99% of my programs I can open more than one window by just executing the program as normal multiple times, the only ones that enforce a kind of singleton execution are things that also acts as a kind of server, one example is Everything search, but it has a "Open new Search window" for multiple windows. And that is the default, you have to explicit code in a lock/global mutex thing to block multiple instances.…
Not on Mac OS, opening more than one instance is undefined behaviour. It may work, but it may also corrupt your data.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#205> Nothing is stopping you from designing a dense and economical GUI.
Then why isn't it done more often? I suspect part of the reason is that most gui frameworks are not really designed for making dense economical interfaces.
> you probably don’t need a user interface on prod. You need a command line interface on prod that
I don't need one, but I often want one. Being able to run vim, htop, etc. on servers is quite useful. Also, it isn't just prod servers. It's also nice to run tuis on VMs and containers that don't have access to graphics.
> I’m not really building applications for other people to use. I’m building them for me. TUI affordances are an awfully big hit to take to get Linux users of programs I don’t even want to publish.
Ok. That's fine. But then why are you trying to convince other people not to make TUIs? If I make an app you find useful, wouldn't you prefer me to make a TUI you can run on your Mac to a linux-only GUI?
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#206The aggressive headline is a hook which is what bloggers have to do I guess, but it doesn't need to be polarizing. The argument boils down to "If you made a TUI only because making a native app is hard, then LLM's fix that for you now".
Making GUI apps has been way too hard on all platforms since forever. Frankly I think it's gotten worse for 20 years. People started fleeing to web wrappers like Electron to escape the horrors of native UI development.
So if that was the reason why you made a TUI, take heed. LLM's can chew through UI frameworks for you.
But I solidly believe TUIs are often better than GUIs even if they were equally easy to make. They liberate your app from having to follow the fracture and fashions of GUI's - Liquid glass, Windows 8, SwiftUI, WinUI3, QT, GTK or whatever. A TUI allows muscle memory that you learned on Solaris in the 90s to work fine in windows 11 in 2026.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#207Earlier 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?
Countless reasons. Invent a gui client environment that is universal, works the same way everywhere, over any kind of channel, and is already implimented and supported everywhere, and utterly weightless in all dimensions (ram/cpu/network), and then you might be able to ask that question without it being incredibly ignorant. Today the closest you might be able to say is web/electron, which is gross on all counts. If a…
HTML/Javascript would like a word
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
>So because TUIs look universally bad You can't stay engaged if the menus don't bleep and bloop at you and confetti rains down on every click? That's a personal problem. A minimal UI is not automatically a bad-looking UI.
No, but I want to click to place the cursor in my 10 line prompt wherever I want. I want to double click to mark words. I want to use a scroll bar. I want to copy paste properly and not "23 lines pasted". I don’t want to read docs to find all keystrokes the TUI supports to achieve what I want.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#209Have there been any attempts at graphical TUIs?
As in, using graphics, vectors, but with a fully text-based UI?
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#210> Next: TUIs work over SSH connections. If you need a user interface on prod, it’s going to be a TUI.
With X based apps, you can run GUI apps through SSH. That was all the rage for light remote access to resource hungry desktop app a few decades ago...
But that being said, in my opinion, a few limited TUI apps are useful, but most of them nowadays are young "cool kids" that wants to be cool by using "terminal apps" without really having really embraced the spirit of the terminal and commands.
For them, using GUI apps would look like a basic computer user and not an expert nerd.
The magic of the terminal, is not that you run things in almost black and white with low graphics, but that you were supposed to use "simple" commands that you can scripts and pipe one through each others at will.