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Building a TUI is easy now

hatchet.run

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Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#151

Post by dwb »

worthless-trash wrote: post #132
dwb wrote: post #48

I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s…

> They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream Isn't this ... everything though? Even the browser which you mention as better in the next paragraph.

No. The browser structures the page in both a DOM tree and an accessibility tree.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#152

Post by troupo »

coldtea wrote: post #100
utilize1808 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim? In many ways, GUI was developed as the natural evolution of TUI. X server, with its client-server architecture, is meant to allow you to interact with remote sessions via "casted" GUI rather than a terminal. Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason. TUI just got the nosta…

> How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim? How many people eat microwave meals? How many eat gourmet Michelin star dishes? I don't care "how many use VSCode". My argument Emacs/Vim have great, well loved TUIs. And they are used by a huge number of the most respected coders in the industry. Whether a million React jockeys use VSCode doesn't negate this. > Countless engineers s…

> My argument Emacs/Vim have great, well loved TUIs.

They... are not great. They provide the absolute bare minimum of an UI.

An UI, even a terminal one, is more than a couple of boxes with text in them. Unfortunately, actual great TUIs more or less died in the 1990s. You can google Turbo Vision for examples.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#153

Post by troupo »

jazzyb wrote: post #101
utilize1808 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim? In many ways, GUI was developed as the natural evolution of TUI. X server, with its client-server architecture, is meant to allow you to interact with remote sessions via "casted" GUI rather than a terminal. Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason. TUI just got the nosta…

> How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim? Perhaps I'm in some sort of "TUI bubble", but I'd bet good money that Emacs/Vim users outnumber VSCode users by an order of magnitude. But maybe I'm just surrounded by *nix devs.

> but I'd bet good money that Emacs/Vim users outnumber VSCode users by an order of magnitude

No, no they don't. Enterprise and gaming alone would easily invalidate your bet.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#154

Post by dwb »

fragmede wrote: post #90
dwb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I said I understand why people build them. I’ve used a lot of them. And yes with the tools we have you’re right, but I’m more lamenting the wonky, kind of archaic, unintegrated, only-semi-composable toolset that we have. No fundamental reason why you couldn’t deliver more structured UIs directly over SSH or a serial console, it’s just that in this timeline that didn’t happen yet (apart from X forwarding, which…

Yes. Composable GUI is what we're after.

Yes!

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#155

Post by sehugg »

sedatk wrote: post #88
mrandish wrote: post #60

Alex, It's somewhat ironic that a web page about performant terminal user interfaces uses gratuitously complex CSS mask compositing and cubic gradients which reduce smooth scrolling on my 1 year-old, high-end Dell XPS laptop (>$3k) to Commodore 64 level (on default 'Balanced' battery mode). While it's pretty , it's also just a very subtle, non-critical background animation effect. Not being a CSS guru myself, here's…

> to Commodore 64 level That’s unfair to C64 which can smooth scroll very well.

Eh, the NES is better because you get two entire screen buffers. The C-64 gives you only one offscreen row or column to repaint every coarse scroll, and the colormap is fixed so you gotta move all of its bytes while racing the beam.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#156

Post by troupo »

charcircuit wrote: post #121
bronlund wrote: post #118

I love Claude Code, but how they made the TUI is just plain stupid. Not how it looks, but you know, the React part.

If the render is already made in JavaScript it makes sense to reuse react as the reconciliation engine instead of building one from scratch.

No, no it makes exactly zero sense to have a "reconciliation engine" or React in a TUI. There's nothing to reconcile. You can just output a stream of characters as fast as they appear.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#157

Post by bob1029 »

I genuinely don't understand the TUI obsession for LLM applications.

Go watch copilot drive VS2026 if you've never seen it in action. There is no way you are going to be able to communicate this same amount of information via plain text in the same amount of time. I can catch a lot of bad stuff mid-flight because I can actually multitask my UI and click into diffs as files are edited in real time.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#158

Post by madeofpalk »

bob1029 wrote: post #157

I genuinely don't understand the TUI obsession for LLM applications. Go watch copilot drive VS2026 if you've never seen it in action. There is no way you are going to be able to communicate this same amount of information via plain text in the same amount of time. I can catch a lot of bad stuff mid-flight because I can actually multitask my UI and click into diffs as files are edited in real time.

Yeah. I prefer the smarts of Claude code, but the GitHub copilot UI in vs code is much better, especially for previewing ai diffs.

I was (am) excited for vs codes new native Claude code integration, but it’s pretty buggy and unreliable.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#159

Post by nip »

bob1029 wrote: post #157

I genuinely don't understand the TUI obsession for LLM applications. Go watch copilot drive VS2026 if you've never seen it in action. There is no way you are going to be able to communicate this same amount of information via plain text in the same amount of time. I can catch a lot of bad stuff mid-flight because I can actually multitask my UI and click into diffs as files are edited in real time.

The reason is simple: the TUI is the fastest way to provide any form of UI over the file system.

Want to do that with web technologies? You’ll need a browser AND a server or build an app using electron or tauri.

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