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Building a TUI is easy now

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Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#201

Post by troupo »

troupo wrote: post #192
charcircuit wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That post doesn't say that it takes 16ms to create a scene and have the terminal rasterize and try and present it. That's just the budget they have. It is the upper bound they have to work with. For example Claude Code could emit a strange symbol and if the terminal has to go and load a font from disk to be able to rasterize something that can eat into the budget and prevent the terminal from having a smooth frame ra…

> That post doesn't say that it takes 16ms to create a scene and have the terminal rasterize and try and present it. So they literally take 16ms to rasterize just a few hundred characters on screen. Of those, 11ms are spent in "React scene graph", and they have 5ms to do the extremely complex task of rendering a few characters. 16ms is an eternity . A game engine renders thiusands if complex 3D objects in less time.…

More on disk read speed: https://planetscale.com/blog/io-devices-and-latency

--- start quote ---

A typical random read [on a HDD] can be performed in 1-3 milliseconds.

A random read on an SSD varies by model, but can execute as fast as 16μs (μs = microsecond, which is one millionth of a second).

--- end quote ---

If you drop frames in a TUI on a HDD/SDD read for a font file (10-20 KB), you're likely completely incompetent.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#202

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

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…

imagine paying 3k$ for a laptop that can't even handle cubic gradients?

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#203

Post by nozzlegear »

oblio wrote: post #200
devmor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your point, I don't understand why you added: > here's what Gemini says Surely, if people care to see LLM generated text, they can do it themselves.

It's a clearly marked quote that adds more details. It's perfectly fine.

It's not adding more details in this case, it's adding incorrect information. CSS gradients are rasterized once during paint into a bitmap by the browser. Theres no recalculation going on per scroll unless something invalidates the gradient bitmap, and it doesn't matter how many steps the gradient has or how complicated it is.

The real issue is something was causing the container with the gradient to repaint on every scroll.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#204

Post by odiroot »

qingcharles wrote: post #47

Gemini built a nice TUI for me for a DHT scraper project I was coding: https://imgur.com/a/u3KHbDT It was like two-shot, cos the first version had some issues with CJK chars. I was impressed as it would have taken me a bunch of screwing around on lining up all the data etc when I wanted to concentrate on the scraping algorithm, not the pretty bits.

What libraries did it use?

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#205

Post by esafak »

nip wrote: post #159
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.

How fast does it need to be? We're talking about LLMs that run in the cloud here.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#206

Post by r0b05 »

bob1029 wrote: post #163
nip wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't disagree. However, the TUI seems to have become the final destination for some major AI vendors. This doesn't look like a stepping stone to me.

I have been wondering where this trend started as well. It's geared towards vibe coders who don't need to see a lot of info.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#207

Post by ahzhou »

esafak wrote: post #205
nip wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How fast does it need to be? We're talking about LLMs that run in the cloud here.

Fast as in time-to-market

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#208

Post by dardeaup »

pjmlp wrote: post #147

Building TUIs was already super easy in 1990 with Turbo Vision and Clipper on MS-DOS, with compiled languages (TP, xBase), using super fast build times on systems running at 10 Mhz, within 640 KB.

Absolutely correct! We've lost a lot along the way.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#209

Post by jazzyb »

9dev wrote: post #150
jazzyb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No need to guess, the SO survey is probably still representative of the state of development environments: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-dev-id-es Note that respondents may use multiple tools, but around 76% answered VSCode, whereas 24% answered Vim. So, I’d wager you’re indeed in a *nix bubble.

That is so different than I expected. Thank you for the link.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#210

Post by quotemstr »

jxdxbx wrote: post #195
quotemstr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A TUI feels like a "real" app as opposed to a glorified webpage. Huh? "Feels"? Plenty of Electron/Tauri apps feel perfectly normal. Like I've been saying, the TUI craze is just a fad.

A TUI app feels like a native terminal app like I have used for my entire computing life, in DOS and then Linux. Electron apps feel like web apps no matter how good they are. I stopped using 1Password when it became an Electron app and became super janky. Discord, Slack, VS Code, the Signal desktop app, all suck UI-wise compared to actual native Mac apps, which even with Liquid Ass, are still better than using web te…

Again this word "feels". Is it not just nostalgia?
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