41–50 of 113 posts
As a user I don’t like what the web has become. People build UIs as if the medium is the message, but I can assure you the content is more important to me than the form. Plain text sports is popular for a reason!
The command box, and being able to reach any function with 4 chars, was the best part imho. I grant it's not a true TUI, as they do pixel level rendering, but the keyboard driven experience and aesthetic certainly makes it a contender
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Visual Studio (not Code), JetBrains, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Blender, every single tool for circuit simulation and FPGA programming would like a word with you. Also lazygit and neovim (since you mentioned modals) are GUIs in the terminal. The entire reason for lazygit to exist is to have a user-friendly experience for people who don't want to use the more complex and spartian git cli.
> Visual Studio (not Code), JetBrains, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Blender, every single tool for circuit simulation and FPGA programming would like a word with you. I am not sure why you think my comment is in disagreement of that. > The entire reason for lazygit to exist is to have a user-friendly experience for people who don't want to use the more complex and spartian git cli. Same, I fully agree with that statement.
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I don't think the two use cases are mutually exclusive. You can have that keyboard driven muscle-memory workflow, while keeping things discoverable for users who haven't committed everything to memory.
Do you have examples where this is the case? In my experience, they've always seemed mutually exclusive.
TUI is just a thinly disguised GUI. I mean it's pretty cool what they've done, but if it's effectively just an alternative graphical frontend (that happens to run in a terminal emulator), well I guess someone out there has a use case where they need to run this over an SSH session? Personally I find CLI ( not TUI) and/or client libraries a much more attractive proposition; otherwise a native application, that uses pr…
I wrote a TUI before for work, entirely of my own volition and for my own near-exclusive consumption (it was theoretically for anyone, but I'm the only person who would've had a reason to look at it - we were a fairly silo'd dev shop). This is what made me pick TUI over a web UI: * no web stack, period. no client/server. no js or html. this simplified the problem dramatically. also, no additional services to babysit.…
experiments in progress here: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_dev/lib/tui
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Do you have examples where this is the case? In my experience, they've always seemed mutually exclusive.
the TUI library for tcell has mouse support, though you see it more in tview (or one of the dozens of maintained forks) I've already experimented with dropdown menus and minimizing sections. While I too love the TUI and keyboard driven experience, many want something they can click on, less overhead from every application having their own hotkeys. For me, it's about reaching more people, and the hope that I can bring…
To me, these reasons underscore the need for a genuine GUI, rather than a TUI that requires users to open a terminal just to have something clickable.
I prefer TUIs over GUIs primarily because TUIs are often tailored for advanced users — essentially, for professionals. In contrast, the majority of GUIs prioritize user-friendly experiences for the general consumer. When a 'TUI' begins to incorporate features like mouse-clickable buttons, drop-down menus, scrollbars, windowed interfaces (as opposed to panes & separate screens), it gradually shifts away from its core…
Also there are some areas that's universally acknowledged to be better suited for GUI, anything that requires visualization like video editing, image editing, 3d modeling, etc. Maybe someone can go full ffmpeg to edit a feature length film, but that'll take some effort.
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> an icon in the dock, system notifications, matching light/dark theme, etc Textual apps will eventually support this and other OS integrations exposed by the browser. It's never going to look native, given the terminal origins. But it will be possible for them to play better with the OS. And when we add PWA support, they will have a more desktop look and feel. SSH is an advantage when running in the terminal. In the…
> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven. That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.) In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games. Some people have…
The only real difference in consideration is load-time. Gamers seem to be more patient than what I am with app load times.
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the TUI library for tcell has mouse support, though you see it more in tview (or one of the dozens of maintained forks) I've already experimented with dropdown menus and minimizing sections. While I too love the TUI and keyboard driven experience, many want something they can click on, less overhead from every application having their own hotkeys. For me, it's about reaching more people, and the hope that I can bring…
> many want something they can click on [...] it's about reaching more people To me, these reasons underscore the need for a genuine GUI, rather than a TUI that requires users to open a terminal just to have something clickable.
TUI is just a thinly disguised GUI. I mean it's pretty cool what they've done, but if it's effectively just an alternative graphical frontend (that happens to run in a terminal emulator), well I guess someone out there has a use case where they need to run this over an SSH session? Personally I find CLI ( not TUI) and/or client libraries a much more attractive proposition; otherwise a native application, that uses pr…
One thing that most TUIs have but most GUIs (web or native app) don't is fast keyboard navigation. There are obviously exceptions to both cases, but as a general rule this seems to hold true. Watching people who are very familiar with the TUI that they're using do complex business transactions is a sight to behold. In particular, a seasoned user will likely type a series of commands that will get buffered until the T…