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Why TUIs are back

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Re: Why TUIs are back

#311

Post by heavyset_go »

_jackdk_ wrote: post #71
qudat wrote: post #62

I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code, everything else is background noise compared to it. What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required. It's a major reason why I enjoy hacking on https://pico.sh -- deploying the TUI requires zero user invol…

I don't think that's true, because it appears to me that the upswing in new TUI programs predates Claude Code's takeoff.

This is the case. The advent of libraries like Rich and others certainly helped, along with the trend of Rust TUIs for system programming/lack of good GUI options.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#312

Post by Pay08 »

MrDOS wrote: post #212
einpoklum wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Qt Arcane build system. I mean, I guess it technically supports CMake these days, but I have never been able to get anyone else's Qt project to build without much gnashing of teeth. Emulated native widgets try for pixel-perfect, but tend to feel wrong somehow. > Gtk Outside of a Linux/Gtk native environment, Gtk applications are awful . Take GIMP on macOS, for example: it's had window focus issues (export dialog ge…

CMake support in Qt is perfectly fine nowadays. There are some (optional) custom commands you can use, but generally it's just plain CMake.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#314

Post by Pay08 »

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…

This is downright misinformation. There are no 100kb Windows programs that work for 20 years. Every single program on Windows ships half of the system libraries again, just for use by itself. Microsoft couldn't be bothered to version their libc at the beginning ffs.

WINE is often somewhat jokingly called a more stable platform for Windows programs than Windows is but there's truth there.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#315

Post by copperx »

qudat wrote: post #62

I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code, everything else is background noise compared to it. What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required. It's a major reason why I enjoy hacking on https://pico.sh -- deploying the TUI requires zero user invol…

> I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code

Do you mean that TUIs are popular because everyone is now trying to imitate Claude Code? or because TUIs are now easier to develop when Claude Code exists?

Re: Why TUIs are back

#316

Post by vineyardmike »

sophiabits wrote: post #179
tempaccount5050 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just tell it html only if you want.

A browser is OOM more expensive to run than a terminal app, regardless of what you're running inside said browser

I've literally never met anyone in real life who used a computer that didn't already have a browser running 24/7

Re: Why TUIs are back

#317

Post by Pay08 »

_jackdk_ wrote: post #89

The diagnosis for GNU/Linux is better than I expected but I think is still incomplete. Yes, you have two major toolkits (GTK+ and Qt) and many minor ones (most of which wrap one of the majors). Qt is proprietary but also available under a free software licence, but what if you don't want that that complexity? It feels like modern GTK+ is less of a cross-platform toolkit and more of a runtime layer for libaidwaita and…

Qt's license really isn't hard to figure out. If it's free software, you use the free software license. If it's propietary/commercial, you use the propietary license.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#318

Post by dragonwriter »

tptacek wrote: post #309
dragonwriter wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you think it’s all a house of cards, obviously none of my arguments hold. I’m not going to hedge that every time I write anything that intersects with AI though.

> If you think it’s all a house of cards, obviously none of my arguments hold.

I don't think its all a house of cards; LLMs are real technology with real utility, in coding and lots of other domains.

They are also massively and unsustainably subsidized for certain uses (and the increasing crackdowns on repurposing the subsidized services for other uses should make it clear to anyone that the subsidies are unsustainable, and that there is a very clear focus on owning certain markets before when the music stops motivating them.)

Re: Why TUIs are back

#319

Post by mmahemoff »

tern wrote: post #141
cassepipe wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but then you get used to jj (or jk) which might not be available on other vi modes (shells vi modes, gdb, glide browser ?) and it's overall quite nice to quickly escape any situation by having the key be closer. Ctrl + [ would be acceptable if it wasn't, imo, the most important function of the editor. EDIT: My bad, you can do it with Glide apparently

I've yet to come across something with vim bindings that lacks a .vimrc where you can map 'jk'. Either way, switching back to ESC is as annoying as it is in the first place.

Claude's vim bindings don't support ESC mapping, unfortunately for muscle memory. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/25306

Re: Why TUIs are back

#320

Post by allthetime »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #138
allthetime wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just what I need! A bloated react app to manage my systemd units

So just tell it html only if you want.

How does the browser interact with the os? A tui exe has direct access. With “only html” now we need a server of some kind. How is multiple layers and running processes superior to a thin terminal based wrapper around the relevant io?

That said, obviously it depends on the use case. I’m not going to make a tui to interact with locations on a map - a web app makes a lot of sense in that case. But something like lazydocker makes sense more sense as a light terminal based program

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