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Why TUIs are back

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Re: Why TUIs are back

#221

Post by Cpoll »

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.

Did Hiro even use a keyboard? I remember everything was VR in Snow Crash.

I, of course, pretend I'm Zero Cool.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#222

Post by hexo »

I'm not surprised at all, if I was to choose from TUI or browser-gui (electron, react, react-native, anything similar) i'd always choose TUI. Good gui design died a long ago. Almost every gui designer needs us to always look at some nonsense animations that serve zero purpose and just make you needlessly wait. There is no such thing as "essential" animation in GUI. And no, plain simple progress bar does not count as animation, but rotating "progress circle" does. GUIs got so unbelievably bloated, it used to be an advantage to have more pixels, as you could pack more information in useful way. Today? Nah. Look at signal (or signal-desktop), it's not even funny anymore. Dolphin used to be good file explorer. Today it's borderline usable, animated so much so that i have to maintain own patched version. One just cannot hide from this, mostly because devs do not understand (or want to acknowledge) need for this stuff to be configurable (instead they more likely focus on stuff no one actually needs. again looking at you, signal.). Or stuff like libadwaita that is likely one of the most arrogant take on gui library ever.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#223

Post by hombre_fatal »

samgranieri wrote: post #213

I spend all day in a terminal multiplexer (zellij) with neovim and other splits. Using things like k9s / btop / lazygit / lazydocker helm / stern / whatever that systemd TUI I saw in here and started and will check out later just keeps me focused in one window, and that’s pretty cool

Also I can use the same tools on macOS and Linux machines over SSH. And I can use these tools on headless machines.

A GUI is a huge regression here.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#224

Post by hombre_fatal »

einpoklum wrote: post #180
thayne wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is lack of investment necessarily, so much as not building the right thing. What we need is a framework that is easy to use, cross platform, open source, and ideally can be used from your programming language of choice.

Are the available FOSS cross-platform frameworks really not that good? There's at least Qt, GTK, umm, and, I guess Juce and wxWindows, right? Oh, I see there are more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G... Can you explain what's deficient about the first two I mentioned?

GTK 3 hello world is 150-200mb. They really messed up since GTK 2 was 30mb (like macOS AppKit).

Re: Why TUIs are back

#226

Post by the__alchemist »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #184
the__alchemist wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Nailed it!

Re: Why TUIs are back

#227

Post by chrisweekly »

isityettime wrote: post #144
sillysaurusx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to. It’s not available to Claude Pro nor Claude Max subscribers. Eventually I got fed up with waiting and just turned off permissions.

Try an external sandboxing tool. When you need to adjust the sandbox, close the agent, launch it with the new params, and resume the session. It doesn't take long to arrive at a stable configuration; for me it's mostly about rw access to the CWD, read access to other local repos, and access to Nix. Other than that I can just use YOLO modes and not sweat it. I briefly evaluated a bunch (had an LLM make a list of those…

Cool, 1st I've heard of nono.sh. FWIW I've been happy w smolmachines microvms.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#228

Post by alcidesfonseca »

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.

What popular desktop application is written in flutter?

Asking honestly, because none of the ones I use is.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#230

Post by Asooka »

I kind of wish we had HTML but for GUI. Imagine if you had a "gui" flag in terminfo and you could send an escape sequence on stdout after which you could send out screen updates as a stripped down form of HTML on stdout and receive events on stdin. I mean something that can describe the simplest bog standard Windows 95 application with a menu bar, side bar, dialogs, buttons, and proportional text. Otherwise we could offer a GUI for applications over SSH by having the terminal open a local TCP socket connected to stdin/out and launch the user's browser, implementing the most barebones CGI.
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