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Why TUIs are back

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Re: Why TUIs are back

#421

Post by ifh-hn »

einpoklum wrote: post #357
ifh-hn wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://flutter.dev/ https://dart.dev/ https://dartpad.dev/

I saw that - and it doesn't seem to fit the bill. First, Dart is a language, not a GUI toolkit; and Flutter seems to be focused on Dart. It also seems to be opinionated in other ways in the introduction, rather than exemplifying its flexibility and adaptability to _your_ platform, programming language etc. Most importantly, it seems it will get you to produce apps whose UI fits a mobile phone rather than a desktop. I…

Dart is the language flutter (the gui toolkit) is written in.

I've no idea what you mean regarding: "rather than exemplifying its flexibility and adaptability to _your_ platform, programming language etc".

It can produced mobile, web, or desktop apps from the same codebase... Dart and flutter are open source projects supported by Google, like android and go lang.

Seems like you're looking for excuses not to use dart/flutter. That's fine but you could just say you don't want to use them.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#422

Post by maccard »

Gigachad wrote: post #260
maccard wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is native on Linux?

What is native on Windows too. These days the term native app is so confused it's hard to come up with a definition that doesn't include electron.

There’s a few options on windows all of which are native. WPF, Winforms and WinUI are all “native”.

> These days the term native app is so confused it's hard to come up with a definition that doesn't include electron.

Electron is _not_ native.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#423

Post by einpoklum »

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…

So, your critique of Gtk sounds convincing, but about Qt, you seem to be admitting they're offering a less-horrible way to build than how things used to be.

I looked at this: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/cmake-get-started.html ... and I'll admit they seem to be hiding some nasty stuff under the hood. But it still seems workable. I guess the devil is in the details?

Re: Why TUIs are back

#424

Post by einpoklum »

ifh-hn wrote: post #421
einpoklum wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that - and it doesn't seem to fit the bill. First, Dart is a language, not a GUI toolkit; and Flutter seems to be focused on Dart. It also seems to be opinionated in other ways in the introduction, rather than exemplifying its flexibility and adaptability to _your_ platform, programming language etc. Most importantly, it seems it will get you to produce apps whose UI fits a mobile phone rather than a desktop. I…

Dart is the language flutter (the gui toolkit) is written in. I've no idea what you mean regarding: "rather than exemplifying its flexibility and adaptability to _your_ platform, programming language etc". It can produced mobile, web, or desktop apps from the same codebase... Dart and flutter are open source projects supported by Google, like android and go lang. Seems like you're looking for excuses not to use dart/…

> Dart is the language flutter (the gui toolkit) is written in.

Well, that's already a strong barrier to its use. When creating a GUI for an app, the toolkit must offer bindings for the language you're using, it's not you that needs to learn a bespoke language just to use the toolkit.

> It can produced mobile, web, or desktop apps from the same codebase...

That's the thing - not really. It seems it can produce a web or a mobile app while will _run_ on the desktop. But mobile and web apps do _not_ work as desktop apps, nor the other way around; the whole UI/UX language is different... even if some companies try to foist mobile apps onto desktop users.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#425

Post by ifh-hn »

einpoklum wrote: post #424
ifh-hn wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart is the language flutter (the gui toolkit) is written in. I've no idea what you mean regarding: "rather than exemplifying its flexibility and adaptability to _your_ platform, programming language etc". It can produced mobile, web, or desktop apps from the same codebase... Dart and flutter are open source projects supported by Google, like android and go lang. Seems like you're looking for excuses not to use dart/…

> Dart is the language flutter (the gui toolkit) is written in. Well, that's already a strong barrier to its use. When creating a GUI for an app, the toolkit must offer bindings for the language you're using, it's not you that needs to learn a bespoke language just to use the toolkit. > It can produced mobile, web, or desktop apps from the same codebase... That's the thing - not really. It seems it can produce a web…

Obviously if you are unwilling to learn a new language then yes flutter is not going to do it for you. Flutter is Dart's gui framework and it's excellent. Dart however is itself a lovely language and extremely easy to pick up if you have any knowledge in programming. Much easier than learning the flutter framework to be honest.

> That's the thing - not really.

If you were to spend some time learning dart and flutter you'd know this to be false. But I'm not here to change you mind as you've already made it.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#426

Post by cyberge99 »

I have a theory that we’re moving back to TUIs because they’re responsive and will be compatible with wearables. It’s easy to overlay just text using TUI’s onto a visual portal.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#427

Post by hombre_fatal »

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.

Dunno, try it yourself. I wrote the hello world with C (12 lines?) and launched it on NixOS in Wayland (sway or niri). Maybe non-Wayland does better?

Granted, not the best measure of memory usage. But the GTK 2 version was 30mb.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#428

Post by semanticc »

kombine wrote: post #359
lucasoshiro wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always remap Caps Lock to Ctrl. I understand that Caps Lock needed to be next to Shift in typewriters, but in computers it seems like it is wasting a key in the home row for only be used sometimes for screaming (which can be done by holding shift...)

I remap Caps Lock to Ctrl when held and to Esc when pressed - the best of both worlds when you live in Neovim. https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd works really well for me on Linux, but there is a similar software on MacOS.

Easy with https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org on Mac.

Re: Why TUIs are back

#429

Post by tracker1 »

MisterTea wrote: post #410
horsawlarway wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm pretty sure you could create an HTML based calculator app pretty easily with minimal overhead. Hell monaco (editor in VS Code) is massive by comparison to most apps... there's very little reason most line of business needs and simple apps can't or shouldn't be done in browser.

You get composition, scaling, accessibility features and a host of other benefits in the box that any other toolkit for GUI adds a lot of developer overhead.

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