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Stop Making TUIs

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Re: Stop Making TUIs

#511

Post by FireCrack »

okanat wrote: post #498
TylerE wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GUIs tend to be made for the non-technical iPhone audience. Except for, you know, every serious professional application ever.

Yeah. This is Unix nerd bs and toxic behavior and silly belief that only terminals deliver complex behavior. I was visiting a radio test lab in last February for our new product. They use a professional software which was written in WPF. The assistant there was flying with the keyboard shortcuts. I recommend every self-describing Unix or terminal fan to watch videos of photo or video editors / VFX people on YouTube.…

Absolutely true. But the OPs statement is not without merit. While there is a lot of professional software for which GUI is the correct choice, there is also a lot of "GUI slop" which is just a GUI to look good on marketing and to be easier to onboard new users at the expense of long term effectiveness.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#512

Post by nickpsecurity »

I enjoyed the article. He has good points. I'll emphasize one and add a other.

1. CPU/memory performance on cheap or throwaway systems has a niche benefit. Mostly poor people. I'm still usually on an ancient Thinkpad with a 2nd gen i7. It runs native apps really fast to this day. Almost all GUI cuz I agree with the OP but my apps are TUI by default to keep them lean and fast.

2. Security. While I don't aim for it these days, it was much easier to make textual apps securely than GUI apps. Secure OS's from the 90's already secured console apps. TX, Nitpicker, and EROS made progress on GUI's but there's high complexity still. I'll note the OP's idea of GUI front ends is basically what we did to isolate the GUI part in a dedicated partition with messages it sends checked by the secure component.

Other than those observations, I'm with OP where I'm tired of TUI's if GUI's are that easy now. I considered trying it with some lightweight, cross-platform frameworks. Anybody tried some with cheap AI's?

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#513

Post by mihaic »

welwala wrote: post #430
mihaic wrote: post #393

The people that keep arguing for TUIs for everything seem like religious fundamentalists that can't be convinced with any argument that user interfaces should be about the user, and need to adapt to the task at hand. Every time I use Claude Code, I'm wondering why the hell I'm regressing to the level of a machine. I paste an image that I want fixed, and I don't see the preview of it. I can't cut or edit text somewher…

> The people that keep arguing for TUIs for everything seem like religious fundamentalists that can't be convinced with any argument that user interfaces should be about the user, and need to adapt to the task at hand. We are users. > Why can't developers understanding that GUIs and TUIs both have their usage, it just depends on the task? Isn't that the case for most TUI apps? They tend to serve quite specific purpos…

> We are users.

In a dual role, I would say that the most impactful aspect (being a developer) matters more.

> Nobody writes a WYSIWYG word processor in a TUI.

But at the same time people write all sorts of other apps that could hugely benefit from a GUI. I seems like if the output itself is not graphical, TUI-enthusiasts won't acknowledge the advantages of a GUI layer, while only bringing in arguments why they can implemented poorly.

GUIs have a much higher surface to be done wrong, so standards are higher. But there's still a decision that needs to be weighed carefully, and many developers seems to simply jump on the TUI bandwagon just because it's easier.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#514

Post by Brian_K_White »

crostlybostly wrote: post #207
Brian_K_White wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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Re: Stop Making TUIs

#515

Post by heymaikol »

cavem0nkey wrote: post #431

You can shit on TUIs but macOS isn’t the panacea of GUIs. This really compromises the argument. In fact I’d argue it’s one of the worst platforms for GUIs. Sure it looks pretty but it’s impossible to drive from the keyboard without mutant hands and savant level of memory for arcade combos. That means the entire OS relies on being able to drive the UI from a positioning device and thus you have to have the coordinatio…

This is probably why TUIs feel so comfortable on Linux. Keyboard-first interaction already matches how a lot of Linux users work.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#516

Post by letmehelpyou »

pjmlp wrote: post #370

Some folks love to live in the golden age of CP/M, MS-DOS, and timesharing green and amber terminals, for whatever reason. I was alive back then already, and was a relief to finally be able to afford GUI powered computers.

[dead]

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#517

Post by boinCloud »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #21

One 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.

> I can run any number of TUI instances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)

Same with docker containers

Same with concurrency

Same with Notepad

Same with exec

Same with bsd jails

Same with copies of data in a for loop

Same with recursive functions

Same with numerous copies of image viewers showing the same jpg and txt files

...it's all arbitrary containers and arbitrary recipes to encode and decode binary

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#518

Post by MisterTea »

utilize1808 wrote: post #505
MisterTea wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hard disagree. Make more TUIs! My big beef is the dichotomy of today's GPU accelerated bit-mapped displays which are burdened with this silly task of running a program that emulates a typewriter. Why TF do we not have a display protocol that can do graphics natively over SSH in 2026? > TUIs have downsides like accessibility, poor mouse support, but work really well if you focus on keyboard input. This assumes a typ…

> Why TF do we not have a display protocol that can do graphics natively over SSH in 2026? Did you mean X server?

Plan 9 devdraw which is really nice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384210#49404622.

X is well past its sell-by date.

Plan 9 is text first as it was written by Unix programmers who wanted to build an OS and write programs (Rob wanted a better text editor.) It's the OG TUI. Window managers like Rio can run in Rio. You control things by writing textual messages from the command line, scripts, or code, e.g 'echo 100 >/dev/volume' to set audio volume to 100%. Someone wrote a new WM called Lola so I ran Lola in Rio in Lola in Rio because I can. Sam is very much a keyboard driven modern TUI ed (the standard editor). Acme is a mouse driven TUI editor. Both can be automated by programs and scripts. You can edit text while reading your email and chatting on irc from within Acme.

BUT Lots of stuff missing. We don't yet have GPU accel. It's a MSSIVE undertaking. And it has to be carefully designed and would likely be a built around a generalized devcompute kernel device.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#520

Post by alksdeef »

sgt wrote: post #351

Oh dear, the comments here are a bit disturbing and hilarious. The "Linux" mindset simply does not comprehend that proper UI's can still be made. Maybe that also includes the Windows mindset these days. Most of us macOS users never rejected TUI's, but we always had world class GUI's.

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