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TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

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Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#251

Post by pseudalopex »

coldpie wrote: post #169
duskdozer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really feel like web interfaces or syncing are really a substitute tbh, and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens, and the program itself doesn't need to be designed differently to work

> and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens But this doesn't work on your phone, or on a Windows or macOS device, right? That's what I meant by flexible, X forwarding fits a pretty narrow set of usecases, while on the other hand keeping programs on the clients and data centrally located on a server allows for a whole lot more options for how to interface with that data. (To be clear, nothing…

X servers are available for phones, Windows, and macOS. X interfaces not designed for phones can be difficult to use on phones. But web interfaces not designed for phones can be difficult to use on phones.

There is not a web tool for every use. And web tools are not better for every use.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#252

Post by zahlman »

zozbot234 wrote: post #159
vidarh wrote: post #20

I really don't want my TUI's to look like GUI's rendered in low res. The appeal to me of a TUI is that it is built specifically to be a TUI, and that means eschewing complexity and detail , and favouring compact text.

> GUI's rendered in low res That's literally what TUI's looked like starting from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s... You have a pointing device, might as well make use of it to enhance discoverability.

This seems really reductive. Some UI paradigms work better at 80x24 vs at 640x480 (never mind whatever resolutions we have access to today). Or rather, the 80x24 text grid is using more pixels than that, but everything is aligned to that lower resolution, and that fundamentally changes what makes sense to do. Floating windows that can be dragged around to arbitrary positions? Terrible for low-res; classic for higher res. Dividing lines that split the screen into panels, and can be moved around a row or column at a time with a keyboard shortcut? Pretty much the opposite (enthusiasts of "tiling WMs" might disagree).

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#253

Post by zahlman »

duskdozer wrote: post #143
spiffyk wrote: post #124

Funny how you can tell a project is vibe-coded just from a first glance at its website. All these websites seem to somehow have the same visual style. Anyone noticed this?

Yep, my fans started revving as soon as I loaded it. Animations are out of control on the normal web as it is, but genAI sites take it to another level.

This is why I recommend NoScript.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#254

Post by pseudalopex »

wolvoleo wrote: post #201
coldpie wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a shame Wayland dropped this. It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days,…

It is, there were tools like NX that made it entirely usable even latencywise. And these days we're really going more and more to remote computing. In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local. But now it's as outdated as X11 was in 2010. And yes I still use it a lot. It works well. Networks have become a lot better and even most cloud compute I use is geographically near…

> In the time when wayland was invented it made sense because we did everything purely local.

People complained of no forwarding in Wayland when it was invented.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#256

Post by evrenesat »

In this age, rich TUI's feels wrong to me. Tools that expose a minimal web server with a lightweight UI is much more welcome than a complex TUI. But for most interactive terminal apps, it feels more natural when there is a single input at a time, like a wizard interface.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#257

Post by apitman »

Myrmornis wrote: post #181

TUIs built today should be usable by AI agents. I'm not sure exactly what it looks like but I'm imagining that every UI view has an associated CLI command that can yield precisely that view. Maybe like formally structured breadcrumbs, or maybe like Emacs "keyboard macros".

I've found agents effective using GUI apps with nothing but the ability to take screenshots and send mouse and keyboard commands. I imagine they'd work even better with a TUI, even if it's not designed with agents in mind at all.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#259

Post by StableAlkyne »

zahlman wrote: post #249
drakythe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TUI means "Terminal User Interface" or "Text User Interface" A GUI that is built with Text, and intended to be used in a Terminal, is what a TUI is, colloquially AND definitionally. What do you think qualifies as a TUI?

This is a pointless semantic argument. Of course you can use the primitives of TUI, especially with mouse support, to reproduce a large amount (if not all) of the standard GUI interaction paradigms. But it's bizarre, and missing the point from a UX perspective. As an extreme example, we can imagine a program that displays the borders of a 40x15 "window" in the middle of a console, with box-drawing characters, putting…

What's with the purism? It's just a term used to differentiate one way of making a UI from another. Who cares about what is practical when you're just trying to give a thing a name.

Even in your example, it's pretty clear cut. If the window is built with text and served in a terminal emulator, it's a TUI. If you build it with a graphical framework that now needs X11 or whatever, it's a GUI.

This is just needlessly pedantic.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#260

Post by GalaxyNova »

nick_ wrote: post #232
sabas123 wrote: post #36

What is the point of having this if code generation is not functional yet? That is the entire point of this app.

TUIs are very in right now. Nostalgia/vintage-computin-aesthetics & guru-gatekeeping around command line savviness are front and centre in the HN-and-adjacent mindshare.

It's strange. For decades we've been trying to move towards GUIs, now we're moving backwards.
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