Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Making TUIs

sockpuppet.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 580 posts

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#471

Post by thayne »

lee_ars wrote: post #256
thayne wrote: post #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 us…

> Then why isn't it done more often? Because it tends to require a lot of thought and effort along totally separate engineering pathways than most of the actual functional coding. Good UI design is not easy, and the skills to do it don't directly overlap with good coding skills. It's hard. > I suspect part of the reason is that most gui frameworks are not really designed for making dense economical interfaces. Don't…

But TUI's are more likely to have dense, economical, keyboard driven interfaces. Part of that may be the target audience, but I also think TUI Frameworks make it easier to make good keyboard navigation and interactions than most GUI frameworks.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#472

Post by ameliaquining »

boredatoms wrote: post #394
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GUI programs can also use the keyboard.

A lot of us do the vast majority of our non-browser work on remote systems. GUIs are objectively bad for this

The article anticipates and responds to this: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/08/20/stop-making-tuis/#:~:...

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#473

Post by elvin_d »

Contentious topic but I have hard time comprehending line height scroll instead of smooth Web like experience and everything rendered in the same font size. I guess it’s a habit for people who started early and never got to use web applications enough to develop distaste to TUI scrolling patterns.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#474

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

boredatoms wrote: post #394
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GUI programs can also use the keyboard.

A lot of us do the vast majority of our non-browser work on remote systems. GUIs are objectively bad for this

You can run Wayland that renders into a terminal. https://github.com/cyber-wojtek/waytermirror

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#475

Post by wormius »

bmitc wrote: post #403
boredatoms wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of us do the vast majority of our non-browser work on remote systems. GUIs are objectively bad for this

Terminal programs are GUIs. So you are using a GUI to access those remote systems. Thus, there's no reason why another GUI couldn't do the same. Everyone always acts like GUIs couldn't possibly make HTTP requests, interact over TCP or WebSockets, or do other remote communication. But they're actually, more often than not, more well suited for that than browsers for specific use cases, which are the use cases where yo…

I'll stick with plain old TTY Consoles, thank you.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#476

Post by i_am_a_peasant »

eviks wrote: post #242
jeroenhd wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. TUIs look bad everywhere, so that's strictly worse

TUIs would be great if they didn't have to render all text the same size, for me that's the main win with GUIs, you have total freedom with what you can do with your pixels.

I would definitely be pro minimalist unicode-character-themed GUIs for what it's worth. Where every graphical primitive is basically a unicode character, without the restriction on font size.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#477

Post by t098i3 »

grepps09 wrote: post #447
ricardobeat wrote: post #386

Hard 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…

I'm very keyboard-driven but I never really got TUIs. A GUI litterly can have just as good keyboard support, but because it doesn't force the user to use it, they rarely take the time to learn it. It's just always tempting to take the path of least resistance. Especially becuase TUIs doesn't really have any of good properties that a CLI offers such as composebility. It's still a fixed UI with panes and menus which ha…

They made a ton of sense back when the cost difference between a basic text-only terminal and a full-color multimedia PC was significant when multiplied over all of your employees.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#478

Post by frou_dh »

Gormo wrote: post #457
frou_dh wrote: post #171

The typical TUI fan is a nerd with no clue about typography so therefore they don't notice any problem with being shown elements that have no reason to be monospaced in monospace. i.e. ignorance is bliss in the world of typography.

Perhaps the average TUI fan is someone who correctly recognizes the negligible relevance of typography in optimizing their computing workflows, and prefers monospace fonts for purely functional reasons, which naturally take precedence over merely aesthetic concerns when working with functional tools. The total abandonment of the form-follows-function principle on the part of purely visual designers, who worry about w…

You can't dismiss typography as irrelevant and trivial aesthetics. It's a whole field encompassing many things including legibility to humans. There's nothing more "functional" than principled crafting of legibility for each UI element. And no, a crude "Just use the same font in a single size for everything" approach is not the endgame for legibility.

Just because there have been some crappy industry trends doesn't mean the answer is to turn away and permanently regress to the confines of a terminal emulator.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#479

Post by evanjrowley »

I understand the point the article's making, and in fact, I believe it's a good one. Ultimately I continue to prefer TUIs over GUIs for one reason: Practically nobody will target TUIs for advertisements, doom scroll content, AI slop, any kind of marketing, etc.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#480

Post by leephillips »

i_am_a_peasant wrote: post #476
eviks wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

TUIs would be great if they didn't have to render all text the same size, for me that's the main win with GUIs, you have total freedom with what you can do with your pixels. I would definitely be pro minimalist unicode-character-themed GUIs for what it's worth. Where every graphical primitive is basically a unicode character, without the restriction on font size.

Some terminal emulators, for example Kitty, can render text at various sizes (within the same window).
Post reply on HN