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Stop Making TUIs

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Re: Stop Making TUIs

#341

Post by amrit3128 »

bhaak wrote: post #318
tescreal wrote: post #316

Counter proposal: stop making gui, ONLY make TUI. + seamless cli integration + network portable + graphics (!!) with modern emulators + always themable + scriptable + works with any navigation modality + you can copy & paste entire segments of your window easily + easy to consistently theme + did i mention entirely network/os transparent? + blazing fast tongue-in-cheeck mostly, but i assure tfa, the tui serves useful…

Emacs does that. If you run an emacs server you can connect to it with an emacs in TTY and one in GUI mode.

With ghostel, the terminal experience inside emacs has become fantastic. Vterm was acceptable, but still too slow for me. Combine them with packages such as ultra scroll and emacs reader, I'm having.ore fun than ever in emacs

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#342

Post by novoreorx »

Bit of an overstatement, but I agree with part of it:

- A lot of TUIs that run on your own machine and have a mature GUI alternative are indeed not necessary. I once tried to replace Spotify with ncspot, which was exactly falling into the "TUI is more advanced" trap.

- The real target of this article is people who treat TUI as a kind of identity, not people who have to work in a terminal because of their job and therefore have plenty of good reasons to use TUIs.

But the title and the general tone are still too clickbaity, which is kind of annoying. In reality, apart from a small portion of TUIs that were created just to follow the trend and clearly have better GUI alternatives, most TUIs are really just side tools that grow out of one premise that we have to work in the terminal.

And even those flashy TUI tools still make life easier for people who work in a terminal. If you prefer GUIs, fine, you don't have to use them, but that doesn't mean they have no users or no value.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#343

Post by cerved »

steve1977 wrote: post #199

TUIs are really the worst of both worlds IMHO. The one advantage that a terminal has, is that commands can be concise and scriptable. But that only really applies to CLI. A TUI is just a poor man emulation of a GUI, without any advantages.

The advantage is that you can run it in a terminal... So in tmux, over ssh, etc.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#346

Post by messh »

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…

Html has also some of these properties, targeting the browser. Don't get me wrong. I do like TUIs, they are light weight and compose very nicely with the rest of the terminal (eg tmux). Also, i generally prefer just cli commands over tuis when possible.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#347

Post by JodieBenitez »

rafram wrote: post #337
JodieBenitez wrote: post #285

> Stop Making TUIs No, I don't think I will :) It's great for admin tools, alongside CLIs. It's portable, it's fast, it's discoverable, it has zero bullshit effects, it's as secure as my shell, it's efficient. And what is this point about agents making it easy to generate GUIs ? They are equally good (if not better) at generating TUIs using any of the great frameworks for this.

> It's portable Not really? > it's fast It's not - most terminals are ridiculously slow, and each TUI framework requires its own hacks to do partial "repaints" using ANSI escapes, because clearing and redrawing the entire screen (yes, just a screen of monospace text!) is unworkable. > it's discoverable With no ergonomic way to build a menu bar, display hints/tooltips, or even support modified keyboard shortcuts well…

> Not really?

It is, everywhere I need it. Never had to change a single line across the various OS/Terms I used. Can't say the same for web apps or even so-called cross-platform GUIs. Been there, done that.

> It's not - most terminals are ridiculously slow, and each TUI framework requires its own hacks to do partial "repaints" using ANSI escapes, because clearing and redrawing the entire screen (yes, just a screen of monospace text!) is unworkable.

I don't care about these details. I care about the app feeling snappy and responsive. It sure does. Again, I wish it was the case for GUIs.

> With no ergonomic way to build a menu bar, display hints/tooltips, or even support modified keyboard shortcuts well across platforms? I don’t think it is.

Discoverable as in "you can start the app and figure it out along the way without prior documentation reading". And we do have hints, menus and what not. Trying to nitpick ?

> Extraordinarily insecure, in other words.

Are you implying the app running from my ssh session is more exposed than a web app or a API endpoint for a GUI app ?

Like all things, TUI is not a panacea and has its place.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#348

Post by israrkhan »

TUIs, work on several operating systems. I use same set of apps across Mac, windows and Linux.

You can use them remotely over SSH connections, and they can survive disconects (within tmux). No VNC, or X11 forwarding needed.

They take less memory. compare vscode vs nvim.

Super fast to launch.

They can integrate with other TUIs and shell apps, shell-scripts, pipes

and lastly they do not contain Ads. lol

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#349

Post by ngvrnd »

user interfaces are for users. people who deal with words may prefer an advanced TUI. Others may find graphical interfaces more useful. describe, don't prescribe. let a thousand flowers bloom.
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