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Why TUIs are back

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Re: Why TUIs are back

#271

Post by nzoschke »

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.

I'm with you here.

In the "before times" an API and web UI that double times as native via Electron was the biggest bang for your buck.

CLI would be a hacker's side project, TUI would be them showing off more. Native would require hiring a team of specialists which is a total non-starter.

In the "after times" API and CLI are getting more love rebranded as MCP and tools.

To the parent topic, I suspect "build a TUI around my CLI" is a slam dunk for an LLM text in / text out machine which is why there is a resurgence of these too.

Hopefully that is the gateway drug to "build a SwiftUI around this", and an antidote to doing everything in Electron.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#272

Post by isityettime »

chrisweekly wrote: post #227
isityettime wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey, thanks for the tip! I'll also give those a try.

Even if I end up liking virt-free like nono stuff for agents, I am trying to explore and learn about microVM options lately for other development purposes as well. This is a serendipitous recommendation for me. :D

Re: Why TUIs are back

#273

Post by dragonwriter »

nzoschke wrote: post #196
tptacek wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it matter how fragmented the platforms are? I feel like this isn't sinking in with people. I was chatting with a friend last night about a SwiftUI app that I'd built and he'd pitched in on. He then reimplemented --- didn't port it, reimplemented it , for WinUI, that night, with just a couple prompts. I am, in a proverbial sense, buying puts on Electron.

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...

LLM reimplementations for parallel versions are going to be fun to maintain, eepecially when AI market maturity ends the era of AI firms subsidizing coding tools as part of their marketshare competition efforts.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#274

Post by colesantiago »

tptacek wrote: post #246
colesantiago wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Every time I read a comment like this, I flash to the episode of the Office where Michael steals one of Dwight's clients while Dwight is on the phone with him in the car. He pitches the client, and Dwight screams into his phone "ARE YOU SAYING YOU INVENTED PAPER?!" No, friend-o, I'm not saying htop and emacs are show-off projects --- though everyone I know who uses Emacs (myself included) uses graphical emacs. My poi…

> I'm not saying htop and emacs are show-off projects...

> TUIs are show-off projects most of the time.

Your statement and anecdotes means nothing and are meaningless since you provided 0 examples of the preported "show off" TUI projects.

Maybe you should re-read what you said again before backpedalling after I gave solid counter examples and you provided none.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#275

Post by akerl_ »

colesantiago wrote: post #237
tptacek wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

The guidelines are pretty clear that basically all of this comment is not ok, and that this kind of comment is net negative for the quality of the site.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky.

> Edit out swipes.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

It seems pretty clear that saying most TUI projects are show-off projects does not mean all TUI projects are show-off projects.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#276

Post by thayne »

skydhash wrote: post #252
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.

> cross platform That's one word that should never been used in an design meeting. None of the GUI I've used has managed to do this right. Even Emacs and Firefox. The platform are totally different (and in the case of Linux/Unix, there's a lot of different HIG competing). So trying to be cross platform is a good illustration of the lesson in https://xkcd.com/927/ The best bet should be a core with the domain with a U…

> The best bet should be a core with the domain with a UI shell. And then you swap the shell according to the platform.

I've rarely seen that turn out very well. Typically it works ok on whatever desktop main developers use, and not so much on the others. That means using multiple frameworks, witht their own idioms and quirks and having to repeat a lot of work. Unless your UI is very simple it is pretty expensive to maintain multiple separate versions of it.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#277

Post by colesantiago »

akerl_ wrote: post #275
colesantiago wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The guidelines are pretty clear that basically all of this comment is not ok, and that this kind of comment is net negative for the quality of the site. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. > Edit out swipes. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.…

> It seems pretty clear that saying most TUI projects are show-off projects does not mean all TUI projects are show-off projects.

Which ones are show off projects? Examples?

Be objective.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#278

Post by rmunn »

osaariki wrote: post #74

TUIs are great for low friction remote work. I do a lot of data processing work on remote VMs with a mix of interactive debugging/eyeballing and bulk jobs. TUIs are a great fit for the sorts of tools I build to support this work. The other UI paradigm I end up reaching for is locally hosted web UIs, as models are really good at one-shotting HTML reports with graphs and tables. Inside VS code those get automatically t…

This nails it. The fact that the app interface looks exactly the same whether it's running locally or in an SSH session means I don't have to learn it twice. And while some GUI apps (VS Code for example) can be run remotely and still look the same, it takes a certain amount of ceremony to set that up. And worse, that ceremony has to be done for each app and is different for each app.

Running TUI apps over SSH isn't ceremony-less either — you have to set up SSH keys and copy your public key over into the remote end's authorized_keys file — but it's ceremony that you would have already had to do anyway to get access to the remote computer in the first place. And once that ceremony is done, you can now run any TUI (that the remote computer has installed) remotely without any more ceremony.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#279

Post by akerl_ »

colesantiago wrote: post #277
akerl_ wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guidelines are pretty clear that basically all of this comment is not ok, and that this kind of comment is net negative for the quality of the site. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. > Edit out swipes. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.…

> It seems pretty clear that saying most TUI projects are show-off projects does not mean all TUI projects are show-off projects. Which ones are show off projects? Examples? Be objective.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

That's a good start.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#280

Post by ghc »

> Reviewing code is important, but it's only 50% of the learning process, at best

I don't know about everyone else, but the code I reviewed as a Junior was high quality code I was expected to learn from. That's entirely different from doing code review on whatever CC outputs.

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