I feel like this is the typical MacOS user stereotype.. Cosmetics over efficiency.
No, for the love of god never stop making TUI's.
Stop Making TUIs
141–150 of 579 posts
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#142"Q: Son, what is window manager needed for?
A: Running multiple terminals on one display."
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#143I agree with the author, as long as you keep the good bits of TUIs, i.e. keyboard driven and fast. There is absolutely no reason why a GUI shouldn't be strictly better than a TUI.
I'll just copy a comment I made about this in another thread:
TUIs are just GUIs that use a grid of characters instead of pixels. They are strictly worse than true GUIs, by definition. The only thing I liked TUIs for is running over SSH, but can any of these newer ones really run over SSH with any kind of decent performance anyway?
I think people are confused and think they like TUIs because they like them being keyboard driven etc. But this could all be done with a GUI.
The other factor is probably just fashion. Similar to how some kids are now listening to music on cassette tapes, which are objectively worse than other media in almost all respects. The less cynical take is it's like vinyl: it does come with compromises but gives us back some of the things we lost over the years.
The actual interesting text-based interface is the CLI. I've seen a few examples of TUIs that really should be a CLI and would be much more useful as such.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#144I find it hilarious that Claude is still a piece of shit web app. Claude can just make apps! Why not release native ones? At least the TUI is pretty good.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#145One 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.
On the contrary, multiple windows is normal and the default but tabbed interfaces became popular due to bloated GUI design. This is all down to design and not due to it being a GUI, though.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#146One 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.
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Re: Stop Making TUIs
#147As a ratatui library maintainer, NO - please don't stop making TUIs ;) As a developer outside of that, I love the scratch the itch apps stuff mentioned in here. I have a vibe coded SwiftUI chess repertoire builder app that fits in that same sort of space that I'm currently working on, where I'd probably not have chosen to explore the idea if not for coding agents. I agree with the article that the terminal is an odd…
> To get a good terminal UX, I think the answer to this is probably to throw all that compatibility mess away and redesign a modern terminal protocol that bakes in accessibility, regions, scrolling, selection, proper keyboard, etc.
Why not just… a GUI framework or layout that’s meant to be keyboard driven and information dense?
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#148One 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.
The other thing is, I've had "computer use" on my LLMs since way before they had vision and macos integration. Since in TUIs both control and data is text, they can simply send text to a pty.
There is an opencode plugin for this opencode-pty.
Terminals + browsers is all I want for most apps.
Native GTK/QT is really good, but I only want it for "system" things like a clipboard manager or file manager settings app and things like that.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#149"I built my first serious Mac application" I will just stop here. No hates for macs, but your typical cli/tui software devoper is concerned about making their software run on almost anything with an actual os. As soon as I see references to specific operating systems or platform specific libraries my bullshit meter goes off. I was expecting an article about methology and tooling to develop guis, got an apple fan tell…
This is covered towards the end of the article.
Re: Stop Making TUIs
#150The LLM fetishists really do themselves a disservice with these wild, over-the-top statements about AI capabilities. I’d be willing to bet money that giving Claude a screenshot of part of this blog post would not producing “something useful” for any reasonable interpretation of useful. This reminds me of a line from Peter Diamandis’ Abundance (basically the only thing I remember) that described Google using a “stroke…
It’s extremely easy to try it and find out. No reason to bet money.