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Stop Making TUIs

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371–380 of 579 posts

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#371

Post by jjice »

The day we get a truly good, native binding, resource efficient, cross platform UI framework, then I will agree wholeheartedly.

I love a GUI in many cases! But if I'm building something, I personally want it across Linux and MacOS at least (personal and work, respectively). TUI answers that problem quickly, easily, effectively, and efficiently.

I'm actually amazed that we have never gotten to a really good UI framework that is cross platform. I really just want something like SwiftUI that's truly cross platform, personally. There are a million arguments to say that we do have cross platform GUIs, but all of them lack in some major way.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#372

Post by dccoolgai »

jjice wrote: post #371

The day we get a truly good, native binding, resource efficient, cross platform UI framework, then I will agree wholeheartedly. I love a GUI in many cases! But if I'm building something, I personally want it across Linux and MacOS at least (personal and work, respectively). TUI answers that problem quickly, easily, effectively, and efficiently. I'm actually amazed that we have never gotten to a really good UI framewo…

"a really good UI framework that is cross platform."

Just curious re: the obvious example of "The Web" - do you consider it "not good" or "not really a cross-platform UI framework" as such?

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#373

Post by jameshart »

pkulak wrote: post #367

And the very first app example is a Mac-only markdown viewer. If only it was a TUI; then I could try it out and partake in this conversation!

Because the author wanted the ability to open and browse markdown files when you double click them on a Mac. How would a TUI better serve that purpose?

There's more on this here: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/05/12/emacsification/

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#374

Post by kccqzy »

novoreorx wrote: post #342

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 ther…

> The real target of this article is people who treat TUI as a kind of identity

That’s exactly what I thought too when I read the article. When the author mentioned the essay In the Beginning Was the Command Line I instantly knew it. I thought to myself the audience of the article must be the people who had read the essay and allowed it to influence their taste, as well as the people who might not have read the essay but conversed with people who did.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#376

Post by folkrav »

cpach wrote: post #251
gr_norm wrote: post #136

Agree with the rest of the comments here: keep making TUIs. Fully keyboard-driven, compact interfaces that live in my terminal with the rest of my CLI devtools are the best!

This makes me curious. What are your favourite TUI applications? The only one I use is Copilot (inside of a VM). ALl other applications I use are GUI/CLI/webapps.

Not OP but, I regularly use :

  - yazi as a file explorer
  - lazygit for git
  - tmux/zellij as multiplexers
  - fzf left and right for a bunch of utils (terminal history, switching between projects in zellij/tmux when working in multi-project workspaces, etc)
  - neovim as a text editor
  - glow for markdown reading
  - currently on pi for my home harness, CC at work
I'm probably missing a few but those are the ones I use more or less daily.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#377

Post by yayitswei »

One point for TUIs I haven't seen mentioned: they're faster for coding agents to iterate on. No need for screenshots or computer use. Agents have made GUIs cheap, but have made TUIs even cheaper, both to build and verify.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#378

Post by jjice »

dccoolgai wrote: post #372
jjice wrote: post #371

The day we get a truly good, native binding, resource efficient, cross platform UI framework, then I will agree wholeheartedly. I love a GUI in many cases! But if I'm building something, I personally want it across Linux and MacOS at least (personal and work, respectively). TUI answers that problem quickly, easily, effectively, and efficiently. I'm actually amazed that we have never gotten to a really good UI framewo…

"a really good UI framework that is cross platform." Just curious re: the obvious example of "The Web" - do you consider it "not good" or "not really a cross-platform UI framework" as such?

The web is excellent! It loses lots of native abilities though, even as we move forward with file system and USB web APIs.

It's also generally resource intensive, compared to a solid native UI.

I would say that, if you don't need more native control, the web is the best cross platform interface we have, by far. But not having those system API really starts to limit it for certain tasks IMO.

When I just want a graphical utility, I build a single HTML file that includes all of the assets required, and all of the JavaScript so I can run it offline (but generally host them on my site so I can get to them from anywhere). These tools are generally text in and text out that I want a GUI representation for and don't need in the terminal.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#379

Post by ncr100 »

Personally, I don't like being told what to do in a title. And personally, my hackles raise when that's combined with in-group jargon.

Intentional or not, the rhetorical style of the title, plus the subtitle opening on the word "weird" before it's defined, has an ostracizing effect on me. I guess that it could have an ostracizing effect on others, though I can only speak for myself.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#380

Post by stephc_int13 »

TUI are often inferior to GUI from a user perspective, but not necessarily by much.

On the other hand, they are easier to build in a cross platform manner.

Linux is probably the most difficult platform to build GUI for, because of all the fragmentation, X11, Wayland, all the different flavors of GUI toolkits, driver issues, window managers issues, font issues etc.

TUI are a bit like web apps in that regard, using the terminal instead of a browser to abstract the platform.

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