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Why TUIs are back

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Re: Why TUIs are back

#401

Post by canthonytucci »

cassepipe wrote: post #37

> The hardcore, moved to vim or emacs, trading immediate feedback and higher usability for the steepest learning curve I’ve seen The only hard part about vim is to be forced to strecth the finger up to Escape for what is essentially the most essential function in a modal editor: Going back to command mode. The ideal workflow is do a quick edit and go back to command ("normal") mode instantly. The fact that Escape is…

If you’re on windows, powertoys is a set of first party customization utilities, one of which is a pretty nice keyboard remapper.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

Re: Why TUIs are back

#402

Post by MisterTea »

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…

> 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 shame that a serial port typewriter emulator has somehow managed to stay alive. Instead of building new and exciting system based on new and exciting technology we get GPU accelerated typewriter emulators. It's a weird form of tech blindness mixed with nostalgia. Why arent we moving on? ssh? You can pipe whatever protocol over ssh.

I would really prefer if we moved on and worked on drawing to remote bit mapped displays. We have examples to learn from: X windows was network transparent though not a well thought out design (see audio.) Plan 9 has devdraw, an rpc based rendering engine that you load assets into then issue draw commands over the wire from a remote graphics program.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#403

Post by zero_shift »

Dwedit wrote: post #254

We need lightweight HTML/JavaScript applications that aren't an entire web browser. You already have a web browser installed, you shouldn't need yet another copy of Chromium to run some HTML/JS files. Because browser makers cripple HTML files run from your own computer (can't fetch any files, even from the same directory), you are forced to start a web server just to run HTML and JS files from your own hard drive. If…

Take a look at Wails, Neutrino, etc.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#404

Post by carlos_rpn »

orbital-decay wrote: post #203
agumonkey wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude code amplified the trend hundred fold but there was already a significant increase of TUI since the days of go fzf, rust ratatui and python rich. My bet would be a desire to do away with heavy browser based UI and the curiosity of trying to test the limits of terminal based rendering.

TUI is popular because a) there are no native GUI frameworks for simple tools that are easy, fast, and simple to develop in at the same time, and b) low fidelity lets you pretend being a UI/UX developer without really being one. The rest is abysmal. It's not automatable at all (the article is wrong on that point), less readable (monospace/no images), very limited (try making a DAW in it...), relies on a ton of ancien…

What do you mean by "It's not automatable at all..."?

At a former job we had automated extraction of data from a 3270 terminal (several of them actually).

Re: Why TUIs are back

#405

Post by horsawlarway »

MisterTea wrote: post #402
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…

> 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 shame that a serial port typewriter emulator has somehow managed to stay alive. Instead of building new and exciting system based on new and exciting technology we get GPU accelerated typewriter emulators. It's a weird form of tech blindne…

This has surprisingly few valid use-cases.

We see this today - there are plenty of protocols to support rendering applications over the wire (vnc, rdp, x-forwarding, waypipe, broadway, etc...)

They get very, very little usage outside of highly technical spaces. The demand just isn't there.

What did get there was the browser - which solved this problem quite nicely for basically every desired use-case, and has the benefit of offloading most of the computation to the remote device.

---

And as an aside - text remains a wonderful medium, with an incredible amount of composition and flexibility. The issue with GUI systems is that output != input. And it turns out that matters quite a bit, and is unavoidably limiting.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#406

Post by einpoklum »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #349
hombre_fatal wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTK 3 hello world is 150-200mb. They really messed up since GTK 2 was 30mb (like macOS AppKit).

GIMP itself is 62MB on my host, I'm not sure what kind of hello world you're building that's 3x that size.

Maybe GP means on non-Linux systems? When you have to "vendor" a large number of libraries?

Re: Why TUIs are back

#407

Post by olorion »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #214
mr_mitm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, remapping escape to caps lock can lead to serious friction if you have to work with different laptops a lot, like I do. The muscle memory gets in the way a lot.

Ctrl-[ is accepted across Vim installs

When using Ctrl where caps lock ususally is, this can be a very comfortable "pinkies out" manuver.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#408

Post by TremendousJudge »

MisterTea wrote: post #402
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…

> 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 shame that a serial port typewriter emulator has somehow managed to stay alive. Instead of building new and exciting system based on new and exciting technology we get GPU accelerated typewriter emulators. It's a weird form of tech blindne…

Recently, I have used both Zed[0] and VSCode[1] remotely via SSH. It works just fine, and it was painless to set up. I remember years ago last time I tried, it was a much harder process.

[0] https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

Re: Why TUIs are back

#409

Post by Sindisil »

lucumo wrote: post #335
heavyset_go wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Better terminal emulators probably played a role too. In particular the newish Windows Terminal. The older cmd.exe console only supported Windows Console API. WinTerm has full VT and ANSI support, much better font rendering, and less importantly, mouse support and Sixel support. This makes it much easier to build cross-platform TUIs. It used to be a chore, now it's probably easier than most GUI frameworks. (Possibly…

Yes, and in fact even Windows conhost hast supported ANSI escapes since 2016.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#410

Post by MisterTea »

horsawlarway wrote: post #405
MisterTea wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 shame that a serial port typewriter emulator has somehow managed to stay alive. Instead of building new and exciting system based on new and exciting technology we get GPU accelerated typewriter emulators. It's a weird form of tech blindne…

This has surprisingly few valid use-cases. We see this today - there are plenty of protocols to support rendering applications over the wire (vnc, rdp, x-forwarding, waypipe, broadway, etc...) They get very, very little usage outside of highly technical spaces. The demand just isn't there. What did get there was the browser - which solved this problem quite nicely for basically every desired use-case, and has the ben…

The web is way too heavy for simple applications. On Plan 9 devdraw text is a first class primitive - its a GUI built around displaying text.

And who said text isn't a useful medium? We are discussing how it is displayed which today is on bitmapped displays.

> The issue with GUI systems is that output != input.

Can you elaborate?

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