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Building a TUI is easy now

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Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#11

Post by 2muchtime »

socalgal2 wrote: post #8

Do we want tuis? I can’t stand Gemmin-CLI. That tui gets in the way constantly I’m mixed in jj’s tui. It’s better than no ui tho Mostly tho I’m curious when I’d want a tui. Most of the time in a terminal I don’t want one

I do.

I want my interfacing with computers to be mouseless and TUIs offer that. I don’t think I’ve run into a GUI, no matter how many hotkeys it has and I know, where I didn’t have to reach for the mouse.

CLI only also requires remembering commands, some of which I use very infrequently, thus need to look up every time I use them.

I think TUIs hold a very nice spot between GUIs and CLI.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#12

Post by SoftTalker »

I don't see any real advantage of TUIs over web forms or GUIs for the same thing.

I do like CLIs though, especially the ones that are properly capable of working in pipelines. Composing a pipeline of simple command-line utilities to achieve exactly what you want is very powerful.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#13

Post by christophilus »

SoftTalker wrote: post #12

I don't see any real advantage of TUIs over web forms or GUIs for the same thing. I do like CLIs though, especially the ones that are properly capable of working in pipelines. Composing a pipeline of simple command-line utilities to achieve exactly what you want is very powerful.

TUIs are much easier to run in a container, for one thing. Though, I guess a terminal-based web browser would work for some web apps.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#14

Post by verdverm »

2muchtime wrote: post #11
socalgal2 wrote: post #8

Do we want tuis? I can’t stand Gemmin-CLI. That tui gets in the way constantly I’m mixed in jj’s tui. It’s better than no ui tho Mostly tho I’m curious when I’d want a tui. Most of the time in a terminal I don’t want one

I do. I want my interfacing with computers to be mouseless and TUIs offer that. I don’t think I’ve run into a GUI, no matter how many hotkeys it has and I know, where I didn’t have to reach for the mouse. CLI only also requires remembering commands, some of which I use very infrequently, thus need to look up every time I use them. I think TUIs hold a very nice spot between GUIs and CLI.

VS Code with the Vim extension is largely mouseless

I use the TUI from a terminal tab in VS Code, my agent works with that and the custom extension with a webapp based interface, seamlessly and concurrently

GUIs, TUIs, and PR/kanban all make sense in different situations. We'll all use at least two of them on regular basis for coding agents.

TUIs make way less sense for your average user

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#17

Post by esclerofilo »

I too enjoy the charm TUI libraries, and have been using them to build a settlers of Catan game[0]. And some features are really cool, like different colors depending on dark/light theme.

They have a bunch of functions that concatenate strings, which may not be very efficient compared to using string.builders, but I haven't yet had performance problems.

However I haven't had such a great experience with AI, IMO they're bad at ASCII art.

[0]: https://sr.ht/~vicho/el_poblador/

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#19

Post by verdverm »

Dagger has a really nice TUI built on Charm. It reads OTEL to create an interactive tree for your builds and containers. If you have cloud setup, it will also push that all to a webapp interface where you can share and navigate in perpetuity. This works for both CI and local runs, super cool for sharing links to failed builds during dev, even while the dev's local build is still running

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPEGTfaFnpA

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