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Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

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Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#41

Post by FergusArgyll »

oDot wrote: post #20
krismatja wrote: post #6

Interesting that Jane Street has taken an interest in TUIs, I think mostly this renaissance is partly due to the current bloat of Electron GUIs. There are other great examples of TUIs that i've seen around the web: https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making th…

Yep, that's about it. I am making a TUI for non-techies, packing it with Ghostty, and sending it to non-techies to use: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

Cool idea!

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#42

Post by skydhash »

barnabee wrote: post #28
bedstefar wrote: post #7

I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking. Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that. Now, I get that a TUI ca…

My take is that GUI frameworks/APIs have abandoned power users. Yes, there are things like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui , and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this. Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially fo…

> I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.

Are you thinking about emacs?

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#43

Post by hombre_fatal »

zokier wrote: post #15
bedstefar wrote: post #7

I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking. Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that. Now, I get that a TUI ca…

> Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks? Yeah, I think that is 90% of it. And the whole related ecosystem aspect. All the major ways of building GUIs suck right now, especially for tiny apps. And to further exacerbate the problem, GUI frameworks are generally tied to their programming languages, Qt is C++, SwiftU…

I don't think much hinges on Electron here.

A macOS AppKit/Cocoa app uses like 30mb memory and is quite nice to develop or vibe-code. But the whole UX of it is the opposite of a TUI you can run in yet another pane of your terminal emulator next to the other panes you're working in.

GUI apps certainly have their place. But sometimes you want a UX like lazygit where you can launch it in cwd and be done rather than alt-tab to a GUI, open pwd inside it, then alt-tab back to the terminal.

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#44

Post by skydhash »

zokier wrote: post #15
bedstefar wrote: post #7

I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking. Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that. Now, I get that a TUI ca…

> Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks? Yeah, I think that is 90% of it. And the whole related ecosystem aspect. All the major ways of building GUIs suck right now, especially for tiny apps. And to further exacerbate the problem, GUI frameworks are generally tied to their programming languages, Qt is C++, SwiftU…

Qt and GTK has bindings for a lot of languages. calibre is Qt built with python. And GTK has GI which allows to basically autogenerate bindings. It’s not plug and play, but it’s not difficult either.

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#46

Post by nxobject »

krismatja wrote: post #6

Interesting that Jane Street has taken an interest in TUIs, I think mostly this renaissance is partly due to the current bloat of Electron GUIs. There are other great examples of TUIs that i've seen around the web: https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making th…

> But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them, I don't know what it is yet but surely someone is working on this.

I might be missing something here, but wouldn't any UI toolkit that doesn't live within a WebView work?

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#47

Post by [deleted] »

krismatja wrote: post #6

Interesting that Jane Street has taken an interest in TUIs, I think mostly this renaissance is partly due to the current bloat of Electron GUIs. There are other great examples of TUIs that i've seen around the web: https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making th…

[deleted]

Re: Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

#48

Post by jvanderbot »

nxobject wrote: post #46
krismatja wrote: post #6

Interesting that Jane Street has taken an interest in TUIs, I think mostly this renaissance is partly due to the current bloat of Electron GUIs. There are other great examples of TUIs that i've seen around the web: https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui https://terminaltrove.com/explore/ https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making th…

> But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them, I don't know what it is yet but surely someone is working on this. I might be missing something here, but wouldn't any UI toolkit that doesn't live within a WebView work?

Yes, and of those, my impression is that there are niche ones that look OK, game engines that look great but take a lot of work, and then there's just TUIs, which look retrocool and run blazing fast, and are really easy to write.
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