TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool • Hacker News Board

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#301

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 9:37 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #198

tracker1 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes far more sense in the context of effectively a remote session or dumb terminal serial connection. Your "terminal" application is only emulating a text mode environment inside a gui, typically... you can ctrl+alt+F2 - F5 in a lot of Liknux's to switch to a terminal session if you want, but that's not what people tend to actually use. Beyond this, without remote X properly configured, again, most don't and pro…

A remote GUI application now runs in a special client called a web browser ; it's a recent development, barely 35 years old.

Where did I say you couldn't create it use a web application? That said, it's not a their GUI, it's a local UI as part of a thick client.

You can definitely connect aWeb.UI to a remote system and over web sockets be really close to immediate. Though you're still interactive with disconnected state.

It's not usually an issue. That said, there is a lot more complexity and room for bugs for some use cases over a terminal session and plain text or TUI applications.

I've built a career on handling the complexities of web based applications over the past 3 decades. It's far from a panacea.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#302

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 9:43 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #264

dwedge wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These sarcastic reddit style comments grate me. And it's also inaccurate, you're not runnning remote graphical applications from a remote headless webserver. You're rendering it locally.

An X server also normally renders things locally, as does a VT-compatible terminal. If you want no local rendering at all, there's VNC. With a web app, you can slice and dice processing between local and remote by running JS locally. Most processing usually happens remotely though, and only the display and command logic is run in the browser.

I've built my career in web based apps... Depending on what you're doing, your exponentially increasing you bug surface in a web based app vs a TUI over a remote shell/ssh.

It's not a matter of if you can do much as if it's practical, reasonable or worth the effort. I say this while writing an application that is effectively a remote web GUI over what can be done in their terminal sessions, because I want a nice UX.

I'm hoping to sell it commercially even. That doesn't mean TUI can't be a better option.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#303

Post by codingjinxx » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 11:50 AM UTC

Reads the landing page, looks at pretty pictures - Ah this is cool idea, i wonder how it works?

"Code export is not functional yet" - Ah it doesn't.

Re: TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool

#304

Post by worthless-trash » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 7:16 AM UTC

worthless-trash wrote: post #22

The corners of the boxes appear in the wrong place in the cell. I don't think there is utf8 characters that allow for drawing on the outside of the cell, (happy to be wrong) ┌ (U+250C), ┐ (U+2510), └ (U+2514), ┘ (U+2518) ｢ (U+FF62), ⌟, (U+231F), ｢┐└｣ Can anyone tells me how to get those 'corner of cell' characters, including uprights and horizontals ?

The fact that i'm the only one mentioning this probably means that most people here have a lot of opinions about writing TUI's but havne't really tried to do it from first concepts.