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TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

tui.studio

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Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#211

Post by mpalmer »

majkinetor wrote: post #192
boca_honey wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignore the haters, sure. But don't ignore the well argumented criticism that you're getting from an overwhelming majority of your peers, as it's happening right now. >can't wait to see where it goes! Fall into this toxic positivity nonsense at your own peril.

Toxic positivity? At your own peril? OMFG. Let's imagine one do. What do you think can actually happen that is so negative? Toxic TUI will hunt you in dreams?

    Gatekeeper blocks the app immediately. You'll see either "TUIStudio cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer" or "TUIStudio is damaged and can't be opened" on newer macOS after quarantine flags the binary.
    To get past it: right-click the .app → Open → Open anyway — or go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway".
A trusting, highly positive person could really be taken advantage of here.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#213

Post by BoredomIsFun »

boca_honey wrote: post #175
stldev wrote: post #128

Ignore the haters. This is an excellent idea, I'm getting some old Borland vibes. Keep it up, can't wait to see where it goes!

Ignore the haters, sure. But don't ignore the well argumented criticism that you're getting from an overwhelming majority of your peers, as it's happening right now. >can't wait to see where it goes! Fall into this toxic positivity nonsense at your own peril.

"Majority of peers" has never experienced proper TUI in their life, and their opinion is hardly relevant.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#214

Post by nobleach »

__alexs wrote: post #40

The TUI hype seems like nostalgia for COBOL mainframe apps that most people have never even used. A sort of secondhand cyberpunk role play with zero focus on actual UX. Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?

Have you ever watched someone USE those COBOL TUIs? Everyone from airline ticket agents, to local governments, to folks at Home Depot while looking up inventory. They could fly through menus and accomplish things. I remember when Best Buy switched to a Windows-based experience. It was terrible. Simply adding a mouse+windowing experience slowed everything way down. I saw it first hand at Target too. They went from an OS/2-based TUI to Windows NT. I know there'll always be those folks that think we're all just trying to play "leet Haxorz", but there's just something about those systems that people deeply connected with.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#215

Post by BoredomIsFun »

jiehong wrote: post #130
xwiz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lack of accessibility of TUIs is not great in general. Interesting. In what ways? I haven't heard anyone express this concern before.

Depending on how the TUI is made, it can be very visual, but lacks structure for a screen reader (unless you stay in the very simple "input field: value" kind of prompt, but even then auto completion is tricky). Web browsers offer the DOM to tools such as screen readers (OSs offer their own accessibility sdks). Someday perhaps the TUI application could talk to the terminal emulator that would itself talk to the acces…

TUIs sadly have become niche tech, and accessibility is rarely a concern for niche things.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#217

Post by robotresearcher »

zabzonk wrote: post #165
jvanderbot wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. A TUI runs in a text session. A GUI runs in a graphics session. A terminal emulator emulates a text session in a graphics session - and allows you to run TUI/CLI tools. This is apparently controversial?

> TUI runs in a text session. A GUI runs in a graphics session What do you mean by this? I have never heard these terms before. I can launch and interact with a GUI from a text application, or a text application from a GUI.

Is it character mapped, designed to run in a tty terminal? TUI.

Is it pixel or vector mapped, designed to run in a graphics terminal? GUI.

Of course strictly speaking TUI is a subset of possible graphical user interfaces, but the term GUI was coined to denote interfaces other than the already-ubiquitous text terminal interfaces.

TUIs have since absorbed GUI interface elements like buttons, checkboxes, and even pointer input, which I think is causing the terminology complaint here. Classical TUIs like Norton Commander are more about keyboard input and navigation. But being text-mapped is the identifying feature of a TUI, I think most people accept.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#218

Post by jandrese »

eterps wrote: post #16

This is nonsensical, there is nothing textual about the UIs being shown here. It doesn't stop being a GUI if you have a 1:1 representation of the concept within character cells. The UX actually matters, and TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power (lazygit being an excellent example). But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the U…

I've been working with notcurses recently and it is a full TUI that handles mouse events just fine. Runs over slow SSH connections and everything. The nice part is that you can fully operate applications built on top of it with the keyboard if you so choose, the mouse is just a shortcut.

Sadly the project is not really in a usable state at the moment. The documentation is incomplete riddled with errors, the code has some pretty glaring bugs, and it's close to abandoned. It's a shame because you can do some really amazing stuff with it.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#219

Post by jksmith »

moregrist wrote: post #163
eterps wrote: post #16

This is nonsensical, there is nothing textual about the UIs being shown here. It doesn't stop being a GUI if you have a 1:1 representation of the concept within character cells. The UX actually matters, and TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power (lazygit being an excellent example). But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the U…

> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI. Hard disagree. Borland TurboVision [0] was one of the greatest TUI toolkits of the DOS era, had all of these: > Turbo Vision applications replicate the look and feel of these IDEs, including edit controls, list boxes, check boxes, radio…

Vasellating. TurboVision was awesome, but it was pushing the boundary of TUI, which in my mind was great for moving hard copy to computer entered use case. To wit, hard copy on your right side, you transfer data to app without looking at screen, but just looking at hard copy, remembering when/where to hit return key, maybe tab for prior field, stuff like that.

But hey, if the screen is drawn 24 x 80 with extended ascii, it's TUI. And man, loved the "absolute" keyword in turbo pascal. Instant screen writes when writing to a 2 dimensional array.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#220

Post by mpalmer »

bonoboTP wrote: post #108
sunaookami wrote: post #85

Vibe-coded trash, even says so in the Readme. Not sure why this gets voted to the frontpage.

Better get ready for almost all software to use AI assistance in its creation. You can build great things using AI agents, and you can build trash. Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.

    Your ideological opposition to that is not shared by as wide a percentage of developers as you may think based on some highly self selected online corners.
Opinions do not win by "high score". Asserting the validity of opinions based on how widely they are held is dumb.

If 30% of devs love openclaw, I'm not re-examining my informed opinion, I am forming a new one about that 30% cohort.

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