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Why TUIs are back

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Re: Why TUIs are back

#121

Post by spankalee »

I really don't get terminal UIs that try to rebuild GUI-like functionality. Don't we think that computer interfaces should get better? We're not limited to a grid of characters to pretend to draw lines and shapes with anymore. You can't even display an image in a terminal without a non-standard terminal like Kitty or iTerm.

It's just a shame that we don't have a great cross-platform, streamed, UI system. The web is great in it's own ways, but clearly something could be a lot better for this purpose. Flutter's ok, but not on-demand enough and too married to Dart.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#122

Post by GoblinSlayer »

mirekrusin wrote: post #95

servo was recently published on crates – it has potential of becoming new standard; electron model proved to work very well the only downside is monstrous memory usage.

It's well known how it works. If web browser is efficient, it just invites webdevs to spend all the extra resources until it's slow again. Wait for AI assisted mouse cursor.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#123

Post by wren6991 »

ohnei wrote: post #19

The TUIs I've looked at seem to be largely NPM dependent? Bizarre that agents apparently don't have time to rewrite themselves in something that isn't a security tire fire. It kind of makes me assume that all this agents taking over stuff is from people working at garbage-pivot-garbage startups that don't really have to worry about any consequences but not being fast enough.

99% of LLM-adjacent software is webslop in a state of perpetually broken churn.

OpenCode for example has not yet figured out "maintain a log of all messages and send that log to the SSE endpoint in the same order to get the next response" and has regular prompt cache misses even with context pruning disabled

Re: Why TUIs are back

#125

Post by kajman »

majormajor wrote: post #36
allthetime wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is much easier to quickly generate a usable tui for simple monitoring and management than a usable gui. Go + lipgloss + bubble tea and a single prompt will give you whatever you need in a minute or two - much faster to compile and no platform specific issues. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window

> I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window I do a lot of work in the terminal and that's exactly why I'd rather have other windows to the side so that my terminal can stay exactly focused on what I'm doing there. Those other windows might also be terminals, but I have a big screen, and I want to make use of it…

Window managers are more flexible than multiplexers, but I also think there's a higher floor of effort juggling multiple separate GUI programs than going between tabs and panes in a terminal emulator.

Multi-monitor terminal juggling also probably loses out to GUIs, though for me it's usually IDE or Browser on one and multiplexer on the other. One big zellij session connected to multiple terminal emulators is probably the best way I could think to handle that.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#126

Post by ne8il »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #114
schmorptron wrote: post #2

I think part of it is also that we're able to still LARP as full developers of complex systems while vibe coding by seeing an interface that makes us look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times

I’ve been running Claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions. It’s so nice that I’m not sure I can go back. Pressing continue 15 times is surprisingly heavy, but you don’t notice till you don’t have to do it anymore.

I would try switching to Auto Mode which is their own recommendation as a safer alternative to that but still avoids needing to confirm actions endlessly: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-auto-mode

Re: Why TUIs are back

#127

Post by sillysaurusx »

ne8il wrote: post #126
sillysaurusx wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been running Claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions. It’s so nice that I’m not sure I can go back. Pressing continue 15 times is surprisingly heavy, but you don’t notice till you don’t have to do it anymore.

I would try switching to Auto Mode which is their own recommendation as a safer alternative to that but still avoids needing to confirm actions endlessly: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-auto-mode

I’d love to. It’s not available to Claude Pro nor Claude Max subscribers. Eventually I got fed up with waiting and just turned off permissions.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#128

Post by whartung »

spankalee wrote: post #121

I really don't get terminal UIs that try to rebuild GUI-like functionality. Don't we think that computer interfaces should get better? We're not limited to a grid of characters to pretend to draw lines and shapes with anymore. You can't even display an image in a terminal without a non-standard terminal like Kitty or iTerm. It's just a shame that we don't have a great cross-platform, streamed, UI system. The web is g…

This is because of the failure of the modern GUI environment.

They want a GUI, but, instead, they have to resort to something like this. A GUI in a TUI.

They want something portable. They want something that can run remotely. They want something they can run more safely than having to expose a socket. They don't want to have to bring up an entire desktop.

Rootless windows are effectively dead. That leaves web interfaces (and all of their issues) or doing a TUI, where all you need is an SSH connection that everyone already has.

In the past you could slap something together with Tcl/Tk, and just launch the window over X Windows. That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

The LCD is SSH, and these are the only things that fit.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#130

Post by victorio »

thayne wrote: post #67
giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

Because nobody is investing in native UI development. Electron is proof that if there were a simple to use GUI stack that companies would adopt it.

I don't think it is lack of investment necessarily, so much as not building the right thing. What we need is a framework that is easy to use, cross platform, open source, and ideally can be used from your programming language of choice.

You are not going to believe this... (joking)
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