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Why TUIs are back

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Re: Why TUIs are back

#231

Post by okanat »

AlienRobot wrote: post #210
einpoklum wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

What I mean is that on Windows you can just ship an 100kb .exe and forget about it and it's still going to work 20 years later. On Linux that doesn't happen. First of all you HAVE to ship the source code if you want it to keep working on every machine because people need to compile it on their machine for it to work, so you're practically forced to open source your desktop app. I know the notion of having a closed so…

I'm not defending this but there was (or has been) enough political motivation and intentionality in GNU/Linux systems to make binary compatibility a hassle. People actually made decisions against backwards compatible APIs, intending to cause issues and forcing open-sourcing.

Binary compatibility means closed source has a chance to grow in an ecosystem. It requires "responsible" developers to put more effort into designing APIs and keeping them alive. It adds complexity that requires a more stable set of long-term developers; in contrast, the constant churn in FOSS requires lower barriers for contributions. With stable APIs/ABIs you have to live with decade-long mistakes. You cannot "just fix it" in a next major bump.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#232

Post by jolmg »

mr_mitm wrote: post #46
cassepipe wrote: post #37

> The hardcore, moved to vim or emacs, trading immediate feedback and higher usability for the steepest learning curve I’ve seen The only hard part about vim is to be forced to strecth the finger up to Escape for what is essentially the most essential function in a modal editor: Going back to command mode. The ideal workflow is do a quick edit and go back to command ("normal") mode instantly. The fact that Escape is…

Unfortunately, remapping escape to caps lock can lead to serious friction if you have to work with different laptops a lot, like I do. The muscle memory gets in the way a lot.

Ctrl-C also works.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#233

Post by sghiassy »

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

Thank you for this comment. As a principal engineer in FAANG, this the correct answer

Re: Why TUIs are back

#234

Post by girvo »

bartread wrote: post #34
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

> look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times I feel seen. I also think there’s a certain element of reacting against absolutely everything becoming a bloated electron app. I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.

Except most of the TUIs I’m seeing are god awful with horrible input latency because they’ve reimplemented everything from scratch in python or whatever. Multiple hundreds of ms per keystroke: it sucks.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#235

Post by agumonkey »

orbital-decay wrote: post #203
agumonkey wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TUI is popular because a) there are no native GUI frameworks for simple tools that are easy, fast, and simple to develop in at the same time, and b) low fidelity lets you pretend being a UI/UX developer without really being one. The rest is abysmal. It's not automatable at all (the article is wrong on that point), less readable (monospace/no images), very limited (try making a DAW in it...), relies on a ton of ancien…

I'd argue that UX these days jumped the shark and that TUI constraints brings back some desirable simplicity, although I agree that they like automation.. but I would bet a few dollars that it's far from impossible (and a fun challenge). People are creative, I wouldn't be surprised if someone made a fun miniDAW in a TUI.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#236

Post by nout »

I think Midnight Commander is still the most advanced TUI there is. It has so many hidden capabilities that you may not even know about. You can be connected over ssh to another computer, while browsing the inside of a compressed zip file and previewing the content of the file inside of it . If you enable lynx motion and case insensitive - you are navigating across folders so much faster than just trying to "cd" and "ls"... It's impressive that this category of file managers has worked the same way for more than 40 years - the same shortcuts, etc.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#237

Post by colesantiago »

tptacek wrote: post #200
nzoschke wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the LLM porting things is a game changer. Does it also follow that we can have pretty much any shape for valuable apps? API, CLI, TUI, Web, SwiftUI, WinUI...

Yes. Developers are conditioned to expect the only convenient answer is a TUI (actually, a CLI; TUIs are show-off projects most of the time) and, if you really want to go all out, Electron. That's not the case anymore.

[flagged]

Re: Why TUIs are back

#238

Post by danpalmer »

I wish TUIs weren't back. I'll take a web interface over a TUI any day. No installing fonts that are too clever, no tweaking my terminal config to get it to display right, no guessing the navigation shortcuts that person thought was best, real text editing with OS standard text navigation, better integration with my password manager, text expander, etc...

I live on the CLI, I have one a hotkey away, but please, technology has advanced significantly since the terminal was the only option, and we have far better options for building UIs now.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#239

Post by neomantra »

They've been back and we're all taking them further than ever before!

For the past few weeks I've been wrapping up Booba [1], which is developer tooling to combine BubbleTea and Ghostty in WASM deployments (using ghostty-web).

It provides for some interesting deployment patterns both locally, over network, and embedded in a web page. It's intended to be very easy to adopt; at the simplest, one just changes `tea.NewProgram` to `booba.NewProgram`.

I used Booba to make a demo page [2] for our NTCharts TUI library published to GitHub Pages. The repo READMEs have GIFs... this page is all embedded WASM.

There's also new Kitty-Graphics-supported widgets in there (picture, chartpicture); I updated Booba and Ghostty-Web to support it. Still getting the kinks out.

[1] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/go-booba

[2] https://nimblemarkets.github.io/ntcharts/demos/heatpicture-p...

Re: Why TUIs are back

#240

Post by bee_rider »

dnnddidiej wrote: post #202
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

I associate CLI prompt and typing 100wpm and lots of scrolling logs with l33t, but claude code is more 1992 DOS program vibes.

CLI makes a lot more sense than TUI to me. A TUI program feels like a new thing to learn, a CLI program is just a new tool in my toolbox.

I can see some point to having an auto-updating dashboard or the like, though.

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