Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

webtui.ironclad.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 159 posts

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#51

Post by santiagobasulto »

imiric wrote: post #50
santiagobasulto wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TUIs are an abomination of design that poorly mimic actually beautiful UIs My mother used to have an early "digital company" back in the 90s in Argentina. We are from a small town in the "Patagonia region"[0] and there was only 1 programmer in the whole town. The guy was a huge nerd that had spent some time studying in Buenos Aires. Long story short, my mother hired this kid to build software for him. This is aroun…

That's great, but keyboard shortcuts are not exclusive to TUIs. GUIs can be just as powerful in that sense, and most advanced web apps support keyboard navigation. My objection is mainly to the claim that TUIs are beautiful, and to the effort of bringing their design to the web. But this is ultimately down to personal preferences, and others may disagree.

Yes, GUIs and Web interfaces can support keyboard navigation. But I have NEVER found one fully exploiting this. Linear (ticket tracking app) is maybe the only one that comes to mind as a good alternative, but nowhere close to the fluidity achieved by TUIs.

I think the reason is "limitation", if you have to design an app that CAN NOT use a Mouse, you'll be darn sure it'll work well with the keyboard.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#52

Post by pjmlp »

rollcat wrote: post #22

I don't understand the obsession with 1980s terminals. They're even less powerful than the contemporary 8-bit home computers. It's perfectly OK to be a retro enthusiast, it's another thing to claim that this is the peak tech to power our modern CLIs, or a solid foundation for portable UIs. From the docs: Stop thinking in standard CSS units like px, em, rem, % Start thinking in Character Cells for spacing, sizing, and…

Me neither, Turbo Vision was cool, Clipper kind of ok for data entry applications, and curses, well it was the way of UNIXes before X Windows became affordable.

Apparently that is some kind of retrocomputing movement.

The strange part is that most folks pushing for TUIs weren't even born and don't get the pain we went through.

We used TUIs because that is all we could afford, not because we were given an option.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#53

Post by pjmlp »

geocar wrote: post #38
rollcat wrote: post #22

I don't understand the obsession with 1980s terminals. They're even less powerful than the contemporary 8-bit home computers. It's perfectly OK to be a retro enthusiast, it's another thing to claim that this is the peak tech to power our modern CLIs, or a solid foundation for portable UIs. From the docs: Stop thinking in standard CSS units like px, em, rem, % Start thinking in Character Cells for spacing, sizing, and…

> Something went wrong here, at least once The higher-level view of data-over-time is inherently serial, and I don't think there's anything anyone can do about it: Serial is the correct/best abstraction. That being said, I acknowledge the problem you're referring to, because serial what exactly? Every time we complete the circle, it gets a little smaller, and our collective knowledge of what is actually going on impr…

Yes there is, it is called a REPL, Xerox PARC has plenty of examples across all their workstation variants, followed by Oberon, and some of that work even inspired Plan 9 and Inferno UI and related developers editor, ACME.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#54

Post by lionkor »

On Firefox mobile the search field is one "cell" too large to the right and doesn't fit... I think I'm good. It seems petty, maybe, but the creator can't get their homepage right with it, I'm not sure I trust it.

If someone built a full C compiler but it throws errors when compiling itself, would you use it?!

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#55

Post by pjmlp »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #46
imiric wrote: post #32

Ah, wonderful. It even mimics the empty rectangles when a font doesn't contain a glyph... This is neat, but no, stop it. TUIs are an abomination of design that poorly mimic actually beautiful UIs. They look the way they do because of inherent constraints of the terminal, not because their authors particularly wanted them to look like that. So bringing that design language to a platform that does support rich UIs is a…

> TUIs are an abomination of design that poorly mimic actually beautiful UIs My mother used to have an early "digital company" back in the 90s in Argentina. We are from a small town in the "Patagonia region"[0] and there was only 1 programmer in the whole town. The guy was a huge nerd that had spent some time studying in Buenos Aires. Long story short, my mother hired this kid to build software for him. This is aroun…

Except my laptop isn't something bound to 1 MB RAM, with luck having a VGA card able to do 256 colors, running at about 20 MHz with turbo button and a whooping 40 MB hard drive.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#56

Post by catapart »

Oh, sweet! I really like the faithfulness to the original subject, while still being useful with a mouse.

I was actually going to write a theme for a project I'm working on that is meant to be styled like an inventory terminal from an auto parts store circa 1995, which was all some kind of TUI, so your theme is a great inspiration!

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#57

Post by jen729w »

pjmlp wrote: post #55
santiagobasulto wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TUIs are an abomination of design that poorly mimic actually beautiful UIs My mother used to have an early "digital company" back in the 90s in Argentina. We are from a small town in the "Patagonia region"[0] and there was only 1 programmer in the whole town. The guy was a huge nerd that had spent some time studying in Buenos Aires. Long story short, my mother hired this kid to build software for him. This is aroun…

Except my laptop isn't something bound to 1 MB RAM, with luck having a VGA card able to do 256 colors, running at about 20 MHz with turbo button and a whooping 40 MB hard drive.

Except it’s quicker to navigate an interface using keystrokes than it is using a mouse regardless of how much RAM you’ve got.

Compare a proficient travel agent who speaks Sabre to you booking a flight on Skyscanner. They’d whup your ass.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=G8n0_3t-EhI&pp=ygUPc2FicmUgY2xpI...

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#59

Post by pjmlp »

jen729w wrote: post #57
pjmlp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except my laptop isn't something bound to 1 MB RAM, with luck having a VGA card able to do 256 colors, running at about 20 MHz with turbo button and a whooping 40 MB hard drive.

Except it’s quicker to navigate an interface using keystrokes than it is using a mouse regardless of how much RAM you’ve got. Compare a proficient travel agent who speaks Sabre to you booking a flight on Skyscanner. They’d whup your ass. https://youtube.com/watch?v=G8n0_3t-EhI&pp=ygUPc2FicmUgY2xpI...

GUIs have keyboard shortcuts for decades, blame the developer that wasn't up to their stuff, not providing keyboard navigation.

Heck, there are even Win32 and X Windows APIs designed with the exact purpose for keyboard navigation and shortcuts.

Maybe instead of doing TUIs one should better spend their time learning the tools of their craft.

Skyscanner failure to adopt such tooling, which browser also have due to accessibility requirements, has nothing to do with technical issues, all about skill and willingness where to spend budget.

Re: WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

#60

Post by pjmlp »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #7

OMG that's awesome. I've been meaning to goof around with TUI CSS [1] but this looks amazing. Props to the author. Maybe it's because I cut my teeth on 80s Turbo Pascal but there's something about the TUI that I feel hits an optimum in the simplicity vs use of visual space spectrum so, so lost in a world of Vulkan etc. [1] https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

It is lost because we aren't producing executable files with multiple segments, jungling near and far pointers, trying to fit everything into 640 KB, while writing directly into the video memory.

Turbo Vision was great and one of the frameworks I am most found of, back in 1990.

Post reply on HN