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Why TUIs are back

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181–190 of 443 posts

Re: Why TUIs are back

#181

Post by einpoklum »

AlienRobot wrote: post #76
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.

To me the worst case is trying to develop some small utility like a tool to search in files using regex. Because if you are developing something large, the amount of time you spend dealing with packaging, distribution, etc., is small and you don't care about file sizes. But if I want to, say, develop the app for Windows. That is easy. You get a tiny binary to just opens a form and runs with a double click. No install…

> There is no guarantee the machine has any version of GTK or Qt installed at all, so to be self-contained

So don't be self-contained. I mean, you depend on an X server or Wayland, right? So why not depend on GTK or Qt being available?

(Of course, it _is_ tricky to be able to depend on any of several versions of these, but still.)

Re: Why TUIs are back

#182

Post by itsboring »

estimator7292 wrote: post #35
abhinavsharma wrote: post #3

To me it's just that they're great for people who live in a terminal - No distractions from visual content - Extreme efficiency with keyboard - AIs can code them up quickly. It used to be a total pain

There's nowhere in a TUI to add oceans of padding for a ""sleek"" and ""modern"" look. There's very very little that a product manager can ""streamline"" in 80 columns of text.

I like TUIs for a lot of reasons, but this one might be the biggest.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#183

Post by pocksuppet »

mgaunard wrote: post #118

Power users have always preferred the command-line, since expressing what you want to do as a programming language is of course much more powerful and productive than clicking menus. To avoid context-switching from the command-line, many essential UIs were made text-only. Another route would have been to integrate the command-line within graphical applications, but few did it -- the main example that comes to mind is…

Blender is a 3D modelling program with a scripting language in it (Python). When you open the scripting pane, it's a command line. But it doesn't try to force the whole program to be in the command line, only the part where the command line is actually useful.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#184

Post by arcanemachiner »

the__alchemist wrote: post #131
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

FYI this is why I still use Vim sometimes. I am OOM more productive in JetBrains, but sometimes I have to feel like Hiro Protagonist. So, Vim it is.

Sometimes I swear that people are just making up acronyms here to troll people.

I assume you mean "orders of magnitude" and not "out of memory". I have never seen the former used as an acronym before, let alone without some kind of contextual clue. (In typical Baader-Meinhof fashion, I'm sure I'll see it again in the next 24 hours...)

Re: Why TUIs are back

#185

Post by mert-kurttutan »

dzonga wrote: post #116

ahh the classic - see one anecdote - then create a narrative that the world is changing. if TUIs were truly back - as DHH would like you to believe - his money maker - Basecamp - would be available as a TUI, Salesforce, Workday, Bloomberg etc would be available as TUIs. Though Bloomberg is the closest to a TUI. but let's continue to delude ourselves.

Yeah. I expected article to give much more thorough analysis and set of observations and trends. As far as the actual observation of popularity of TUI, the only relevant part is claude and codex. The rest is about his personal opinion of TUI (vs other UIs)

Nobody here (especially top comments) seems to mention this.

Very low on the actual information side.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#186

Post by zer0zzz »

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

Can it be much more simple of a reason and that tuis fit into many of our existing tmux based work flows?

Re: Why TUIs are back

#187

Post by agumonkey »

qudat wrote: post #62

I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code, everything else is background noise compared to it. What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required. It's a major reason why I enjoy hacking on https://pico.sh -- deploying the TUI requires zero user invol…

Claude code amplified the trend hundred fold but there was already a significant increase of TUI since the days of go fzf, rust ratatui and python rich.

My bet would be a desire to do away with heavy browser based UI and the curiosity of trying to test the limits of terminal based rendering.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#188

Post by einpoklum »

whartung wrote: post #128
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 interfa…

> That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

If you:

1. Have a low-latency connection to a decent machine, and 2. Are on a machine that's weak, or isn't yours, or that you don't fully control (e.g. employer forces you to run Windows)

... then you live in remote X apps my friend.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#189

Post by hsn915 »

qudat wrote: post #62

I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code, everything else is background noise compared to it. What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required. It's a major reason why I enjoy hacking on https://pico.sh -- deploying the TUI requires zero user invol…

The TUI version of ClaudeCode is not even that good compared even to the VSCode plugin.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#190

Post by einpoklum »

ifh-hn wrote: post #174

I'm pretty sure dismissing flutter is ignoring reality. It, and more so dart, are not popular on HN, but it definitely is a popular and still in development truly cross platform framework.

Where would one go to familiarize one's self with Flutter and with dart?
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