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

WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

webtui.ironclad.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 159 posts

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#121

Post by EasyMark »

__float wrote: post #81
dullcrisp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I just use :w to save in my graphical editors too. It’s easier to type.

No, it's objectively more difficult to type [on a qwerty keyboard]. cmd-s is a single keypress and can be done with a single hand. shift-; w cr is two more and involves a back and forth over the entire keyboard.

right but easy doesn't always mean fewest key strokes, it can simply mean "I have muscle memory for exiting this editor that I use 43% of my working hours with so Imma map it to exiting my browser and ________ app as well." . I personally have to move between too many systems for something like that to be useful to me but if you stay on a single machine most of your work day I can see the value.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#122

Post by EasyMark »

suobset wrote: post #76
rollcat wrote: post #22

I don't understand the obsession with 1980s terminals. They're even less powerful than the contemporary 8-bit home computers. It's perfectly OK to be a retro enthusiast, it's another thing to claim that this is the peak tech to power our modern CLIs, or a solid foundation for portable UIs. From the docs: Stop thinking in standard CSS units like px, em, rem, % Start thinking in Character Cells for spacing, sizing, and…

Personally I felt this as a retro hobbyist project. I don't see it being used for serious matters, but I'd snag something like this up for my personal website any day!!

It would make a lovely homepage, expecially for retro computing sites, archives of 60s-90s, etc. I'm not sure why people get angry when developers go outside the box and make something nifty. I have been using the star trek console looking theme for my pihole for years and still love the aesthetic.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#123

Post by rollcat »

godelski wrote: post #102
rollcat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Two things can be true at the same time, TUIs are superior to GUIs, and GUIs are superior to TUIs. TUIs are GUIs - in a trench coat. A TUI program must still process input events, draw widgets, manage state & focus, etc - all the things a GUI must do. What OTOH it can't do, is even the most basic stuff, like system clipboard or displaying pictures. You have to use side channels to get that, and once you do, you thr…

My terminal can display pictures and use the clipboard. Most of them can in fact. You might be limited in pictures on some but neither do we live in the 90's anymore. I routinely login to remote machines and view the pictures I have stored on them through my terminal

> My terminal can [...] use the clipboard.

Yes, but the TUI application running in it can't - unless using non-portable side channels such as pbcopy or xclip. Copying text is limited to what's visible on your screen (and have fun if it's drawn inside a widget). When pasting, you're dumping the text as if it was typed in. Also, have fun with Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V.

> You might be limited in pictures [...]

That's right, sixels are indeed 1980s technology, seems like VT200 can do that.

But you know what I mean. It can't do audio, video, HDR pictures, precise mouse motion, accessibility, or even recognise shift+alt (ran out of bits in ASCII). It's a serial link, and using a side channel is just cheating.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#124

Post by [deleted] »

troupo wrote: post #48
rollcat wrote: post #22

I don't understand the obsession with 1980s terminals. They're even less powerful than the contemporary 8-bit home computers. It's perfectly OK to be a retro enthusiast, it's another thing to claim that this is the peak tech to power our modern CLIs, or a solid foundation for portable UIs. From the docs: Stop thinking in standard CSS units like px, em, rem, % Start thinking in Character Cells for spacing, sizing, and…

The obsession is with information-dense quick-to-use low-latency interfaces that are nearly impossible to replicate with most modern tools [1] Whether libraries like this one manage to replicate the experience is a whole other question. [1] Just look at what modern tools FilePilot and RAD Debugger can do with their UIs and compare that to nearly every single one of modern apps.

[deleted]

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#125

Post by rollcat »

bhaak wrote: post #93
rollcat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Two things can be true at the same time, TUIs are superior to GUIs, and GUIs are superior to TUIs. TUIs are GUIs - in a trench coat. A TUI program must still process input events, draw widgets, manage state & focus, etc - all the things a GUI must do. What OTOH it can't do, is even the most basic stuff, like system clipboard or displaying pictures. You have to use side channels to get that, and once you do, you thr…

But the original terminal was also already using a side channel. You used them to connect to a remote piece of hardware and weren’t running anything locally. In that sense ssh itself is also a side channel. I also don’t know why you consider manipulating the system clipboard a side channel. The terminal emulator provides a way of manipulating the clipboard but that is just convenience. Any program can access the clip…

> But the original terminal was also already using a side channel.

What? The serial link was the only way for the terminal to talk to the Big Machine. There never was a "side channel", in fact things like control flow are mixed in-band; that's why some programs get confused about C-s and C-q.

> The terminal emulator provides a way of manipulating the clipboard but that is just convenience.

That's different from the TUI application accessing the system clipboard. You need to use pbcopy or xclip, that's non-portable, won't work over SSH, relies on those external tools being installed, etc.

> I would actually like to have a network wide clipboard system. There are solution for that but I haven’t yet found any that isn’t too unwieldy.

Try any two Apple devices signed in to the same iCloud account. It works OOB, zero setup, 100% reliable. It's called Continuity: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108046>

Yeah, proprietary, non-portable, etc. Choose your trade-offs.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#126

Post by rollcat »

geocar wrote: post #94
pjmlp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a a barebones REPL from early 1960's, not the experience I was mentioning. Imagine Emacs mixed with Jupiter netbooks, for the whole OS stack.

> Imagine Emacs mixed with Jupiter netbooks, for the whole OS stack. Sounds dreadful. > That is a a barebones REPL from early 1960's, not the experience I was mentioning. No, that is a definite article. I was talking about three things, two of which are things you brought up in an effort to find common ground. If you don't know Oberon or Acme then there's no point in talking to you about them. I still don't know what…

> Sounds dreadful.

Depends. Emacs has had brilliant ideas, did brave things, it just remained stagnant for the past 30 years. (Unlike terminal emulators, which do boring things, and have been stagnant for 40 years.)

A slightly better REPL doesn't have to be brave. It just needs a sensible text editing widget, that's already a tenfold improvement. The cognitive load between Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Shift-C drives me crazy.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#127

Post by godelski »

rollcat wrote: post #123
godelski wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My terminal can display pictures and use the clipboard. Most of them can in fact. You might be limited in pictures on some but neither do we live in the 90's anymore. I routinely login to remote machines and view the pictures I have stored on them through my terminal

> My terminal can [...] use the clipboard. Yes, but the TUI application running in it can't - unless using non-portable side channels such as pbcopy or xclip. Copying text is limited to what's visible on your screen (and have fun if it's drawn inside a widget). When pasting, you're dumping the text as if it was typed in. Also, have fun with Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V. > You might be limited in pictures [...] That's right, sixel…

Sure, I'm not going to use my terminal to watch HD movies in. Nor am I going to use it to browse the web. But we're being a bit obtuse here in thinking the terminal is going to do everything. There is no single tool that solves all problems. Not even the computer, as general as it is. That's okay.

Being terminally terminal doesn't mean I only use the terminal and go headless on all my machines. It is my main interface with my computers but I'm writing to you from Firefox. Nor am I going to play steam games in it. But most of the time I'm on my computer I'm not playing games or watching movies. Even with web browsing 99% of what I'm doing I don't actually need these things.

I'd love to have a web that is much more minimal. We don't need to go to walls of text like the 80's, nor even as stripped as HN (which is very lightweight), but there is a nice elegance to more minimal pages (more than just aesthetics) and the zippy experience is almost universally appreciated.

And again, a lot has changed from the 80's and no, a VT200 cannot create the images I see on my machine. I'm not looking at pixelated junk. When I'm running chafa I'm getting something quite similar to what I'm seeing if I open the picture through my file manager. I'm sure if I zoomed in I could tell the difference but that's not my usual workload.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#128

Post by godelski »

nickandbro wrote: post #116
godelski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this ask for a login when I click on "motions". Sorry but insta pass for me

Because I have to spin up a neovim instance for every user on the backend, I only allow authenticated users to gate the amount of users at this time. I am going to adjust the site more to reflect that as it’s more of interactive experience rather that a vim tips site.

Seems you could give some more clarity on the site then. I thought that page was just going to tell me what motions were supported. And staring a neovim instance does not seem like that heavy but I can understand even a small load can be a lot if hit hard. But yeah, I pretty much have no idea what to expect when landing on the page.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#129

Post by nickandbro »

godelski wrote: post #128
nickandbro wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I have to spin up a neovim instance for every user on the backend, I only allow authenticated users to gate the amount of users at this time. I am going to adjust the site more to reflect that as it’s more of interactive experience rather that a vim tips site.

Seems you could give some more clarity on the site then. I thought that page was just going to tell me what motions were supported. And staring a neovim instance does not seem like that heavy but I can understand even a small load can be a lot if hit hard. But yeah, I pretty much have no idea what to expect when landing on the page.

Thanks for the feedback. Your right will update the site to reflect that.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#130

Post by nikau »

pjmlp wrote: post #59
jen729w wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it’s quicker to navigate an interface using keystrokes than it is using a mouse regardless of how much RAM you’ve got. Compare a proficient travel agent who speaks Sabre to you booking a flight on Skyscanner. They’d whup your ass. https://youtube.com/watch?v=G8n0_3t-EhI&pp=ygUPc2FicmUgY2xpI...

GUIs have keyboard shortcuts for decades, blame the developer that wasn't up to their stuff, not providing keyboard navigation. Heck, there are even Win32 and X Windows APIs designed with the exact purpose for keyboard navigation and shortcuts. Maybe instead of doing TUIs one should better spend their time learning the tools of their craft. Skyscanner failure to adopt such tooling, which browser also have due to acce…

The difference is keystroke buffering - the agent in sabre can type ahead while the system is processing a transaction, the web/gui user has to wait for each screen to load.
Post reply on HN