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Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#21

Post by coldtea »

bedstefar wrote: post #7

I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking. Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that. Now, I get that a TUI ca…

>Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that.

Bypassing all that crap is the main benefit. I don't want any of that superfluous, and ever-changing stuff, when the terminal and, if needed, a TUI, is enough. As a bonus, it works everywhere I can ssh to.

>If all we work in are these super-lean TUIs maybe we don't even need so powerful computers or such high-DPI displays anymore?

For a lot of stuff, you never needed it. For others, like an IDE, DTP, gaming, 3D modelling, video editing, photo editing, they're amazing.

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#22

Post by bedstefar »

aacid wrote: post #11
bedstefar wrote: post #7

I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking. Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that. Now, I get that a TUI ca…

You've answered yourself if fourth paragraph. For me (and guessing for many other engineers) usability is more important than crisp visuals.. I personally prefer same font (one I choose) everywhere opposed to "whichever font developer likes for his app). TUI apps are quick, efficient, portable and usable through ssh. If crisp graphics is the only downside I really don't mind.

Yeah, but as far as I'm aware you get to pick one font and one size as long as the UI is laid out with literal ASCII spaces and newlines. You can't have tooltips with a smaller font, or code and prose together with monospaced/serif fonts accordingly.

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#23

Post by bedstefar »

geocar wrote: post #12
bedstefar wrote: post #7

I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking. Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that. Now, I get that a TUI ca…

> as such they are composable in the sense that they can be used in a way the author(s) didn't think of. It's been a while since I've done any of that personally, I do this all the time. One of my favourite applications is a tool called "autoexpect" and I use it every time I try a new program. What it does is this: I run a program in it's virtual terminal, and it writes a TCL script that does what I did, and puts lit…

> Modern (as in, since the 1980s) terminals are very capable of multiple fonts and font-sizes. I usually use a non-proportional font for coding myself.

Is that really true? Can I, in one terminal window, have prose with a serif font and code with a monospaced font at the same time? If I hover over something with my mouse, can I have a TUI tooltip at a smaller font size?

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#24

Post by coldtea »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #16
citrin_ru wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TUI returns what GUI lost over the last decades - low latency, low RAM/CPU usage, ability to navigate without a mouse. No one seems to be building nice GUI apps anymore.

Unfortunately, they often lack what we gained over the last decades. Namely navigating with a mouse and being self-explanatory and same-y. The latter is mostly because certain GUI patterns simply cannot be implemented with a TUI. And then everyone has their own idea of what keyboard shortcuts should be like. Yuck

>Unfortunately, they often lack what we gained over the last decades. Namely navigating with a mouse

For those workflows (as opposed, to say, Photoshop), we could do without that. That's the whole benefit.

>and being self-explanatory and same-y.

GUIs are quite less same-y that TUI. Not to mention the same app GUI can be widely different between 2010 and 2026, whereas any TUIs from 1990s I still use look and work the same.

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#25

Post by davidcann »

bedstefar wrote: post #7

I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking. Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that. Now, I get that a TUI ca…

You can also sandbox TUIs, with full control of the sandbox parameters. To do this on macOS, you can use: https://multitui.com

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#26

Post by geocar »

bedstefar wrote: post #23
geocar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as such they are composable in the sense that they can be used in a way the author(s) didn't think of. It's been a while since I've done any of that personally, I do this all the time. One of my favourite applications is a tool called "autoexpect" and I use it every time I try a new program. What it does is this: I run a program in it's virtual terminal, and it writes a TCL script that does what I did, and puts lit…

> Modern (as in, since the 1980s) terminals are very capable of multiple fonts and font-sizes. I usually use a non-proportional font for coding myself. Is that really true? Can I, in one terminal window, have prose with a serif font and code with a monospaced font at the same time? If I hover over something with my mouse, can I have a TUI tooltip at a smaller font size?

Yes such-a-thing-is-possible: The DEC VT330 (for example) allowed font upload, had multiple font sizes, and even mouse support.

There once was a program called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManaGeR which appears at first blush to be some kind of X11-competitor, except it was using the VT330's regular terminal capabilities to do those fancy pixel-patterns and fonts, and so there's just some weird VT escape sequences you've never heard of in there.

You can also use SIXELs if you want even more control, and you can readily see such things in action because qemu can (in 2026) send its graphical VGA display into a sixel terminal, but in the 1980s such a thing would not have been performant (probably something like 3 frames per minute) because the VT330 was slow, and such a thing would not be popular you would "lose the text" at some layer which would be as inconvenient as using any other graphical application.

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#27

Post by schonfinkel »

krismatja wrote: post #6

Interesting that Jane Street has taken an interest in TUIs, I think mostly this renaissance is partly due to the current bloat of Electron GUIs. There are other great examples of TUIs that i've seen around the web: https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making th…

> But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them

I like this new TUI renaissance as well, but if you wanna see what a symbiotic relationship between GUIs x TUIs could look like you need to see what Emacs does with Orgmode and the whole Org ecosystem of org-agenda, org-roam, etc. Lot's of these TUIs from the awesome are somewhat already inside Emacs.

https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/manual/Agenda-Views.html

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#28

Post by barnabee »

bedstefar wrote: post #7

I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking. Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that. Now, I get that a TUI ca…

My take is that GUI frameworks/APIs have abandoned power users.

Yes, there are things like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this.

Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially for someone who remembers adding a couple of libraries to a Delphi project back in the Office 2000s era and getting full docking, configurable toolbars, etc. with little to no work.

So the easy fallback (especially with the recent proliferation of libraries) is TUI and CLI applications with the layout/docking and tabs provided by the terminal emulator itself or one of tmux/zellij/etc.

I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#29

Post by fragmede »

oDot wrote: post #20
krismatja wrote: post #6

Interesting that Jane Street has taken an interest in TUIs, I think mostly this renaissance is partly due to the current bloat of Electron GUIs. There are other great examples of TUIs that i've seen around the web: https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making th…

Yep, that's about it. I am making a TUI for non-techies, packing it with Ghostty, and sending it to non-techies to use: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

Soooo... lib ghostty supports the kitty (but not sixel) terminal image format.

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#30

Post by citrin_ru »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #16
citrin_ru wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TUI returns what GUI lost over the last decades - low latency, low RAM/CPU usage, ability to navigate without a mouse. No one seems to be building nice GUI apps anymore.

Unfortunately, they often lack what we gained over the last decades. Namely navigating with a mouse and being self-explanatory and same-y. The latter is mostly because certain GUI patterns simply cannot be implemented with a TUI. And then everyone has their own idea of what keyboard shortcuts should be like. Yuck

IMHO peak GUI was in 2000s - on Windows most app used Win32 API and apps which followed "Microsoft Windows User Experience" guide had consistent UI/UX. Since then Microsoft introduced many competing frameworks to create GUI all look slightly different and UX is less consistent too. And then Electron come which brought inconsistency of web to the desktop apps.
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