But TUIs make me feel smart, and my work feel important and esoteric.
Stop Making TUIs
381–390 of 579 posts
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#382TUI 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…
> a user perspective
a lot of boomer and millennial dev users love TUI bc that's what they grew up with. part of A\'s early success is hit that sweet spot and triggered a culture shift late last year.
as those age group phasing out, web ui will be dominant
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#383how about we stop making single window UIs
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#384Counter 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…
TUIs and GUIs are both mostly bad for the same reason, you have to learn a new “language” of interaction for with each program, finding the buttons and figuring out how the designer thought the information should be hidden from you.
Stop building user interfaces in general. A command line interface is best. If someone doesn’t want to learn how to talk to the computer, they can ask a chatbot to drive the CLI for them.
Edit: the only TUI anyone should be willing to learn is their text editor, vim or emacs, because that’s fine for 99% of tasks.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#385The 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…
Maybe you should re-examine your priors, because reality is sending you a lot of data that refutes them. If it were feasible to do this, I think it would be done by now. There are a lot of reasons it is very difficult, and while there may be no reason it is impossible, something can become practically impossible when you pile constraint after constraint on it.
One example - wxWidgets exist, and wxDart exist, but getting to something half as usable as Flutter from there is almost impossible. I defy you to even build a layout engine that works on all three platforms. After that, you still have to find answers for theming, spacing, responsive behavior, component composition, inspection/debugging, hot reload, accessibility conventions and on and on.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#386Hard disagree. Make more TUIs!
TUIs have downsides like accessibility, poor mouse support, but work really well if you focus on keyboard input. It is a better/faster input mode to begin with, especially for power users, but also for average people; you'd be surprised at how much more user-friendly an arrow-keys driven UI can be vs modern web interfaces.
I've been building my own TUI framework [1] and getting amazing results. Good TUIs are more of a GUI than a dumb text terminal.
If we had a cross-platform usable GUI framework, and more consistency across OSes, the story would be different.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#387Counter 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…
> network portable
They're an absolute torture to work with over a dodgy connection, which often may not even be your fault. Looking at you AWS.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#388Honestly I would stop making TUIs if we had a better alternative to Electron/Tauri for multi-platform apps that run natively. I will keep building TUIs because they are the easiest way to reach support all OSes.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#389One 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.
That’s interesting. The browser is also a host of multi-instance applications which makes it a good platform for this. The ChatGPT web app works better with multiple tabs than selecting its in-app sessions in a single tab. Good observation.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#390As a ratatui library maintainer, NO - please don't stop making TUIs ;) As a developer outside of that, I love the scratch the itch apps stuff mentioned in here. I have a vibe coded SwiftUI chess repertoire builder app that fits in that same sort of space that I'm currently working on, where I'd probably not have chosen to explore the idea if not for coding agents. I agree with the article that the terminal is an odd…
So...emacs