Earlier quoted context omitted.
>A TUI can't prevent the user from copying text by its very nature. Funny but I struggle with copying anything in most recent TUIs. Fancy padding or multiplexer borders and multiple lines of text? It breaks. Incomplete text in a spreadsheet column (tabiew) or a narrow internal window? It breaks. Ohmypi literally has a separate command to copy the prompt because of that, and another command to copy the model reply. TU…
> Funny but I struggle with copying anything in most recent TUIs. Fancy padding or multiplexer borders and multiple lines of text? It breaks. Incomplete text in a spreadsheet column (tabiew) or a narrow internal window? Hold Alt while trying to select to make a rectangular/block selection. To avoid a TUI's mouse handling and use the terminal's, hold Shift. So, for example, if you're on tmux with "panes" (internal win…
I don't see how block selection helps on cut text. In GUI you simply select the partial element and copy it, with either mouse or keyboard. You can also display it (or a tooltip) above the rest while selected, which is what compactified tabular views usually do. Turns out layout engines have a purpose in dense interfaces after all.
>Yeah, the interfaces of coding agents are really poorly made. It's like they only know GUIs but wanted to have it work for a terminal. They really should have been CLIs instead of TUIs. That way you could just use the terminal scrollback buffer.
No, they really are much better off with web or GUI, terminals use unreadable monospace and simply aren't well suited for large amount of rich text, schematics, pictograms, and pictures. They are fundamentally not CLIs as well, they're interactive programs with complex interface layout that is not limited to basic chatbot input+scrollback (let alone text input, it's not just text).
That relates to most TUIs I see, they use TUI because it's fashionable - status monitors, dashboards, file managers, you name it. TUI is suited for very few purposes most of which are pretty basic (e.g. status line-style UIs for CLI), anything more complex such as a file manager and it quickly becomes awkward. FAR Manager had to reinvent everything from scratch (including, ridiculously, picture thumbnails in a custom-built terminal) and it's still worse than Total Commander which just used what the UI framework already provides, for the most part.
>Hmmm... not really? Maybe you're thinking vim vs emacs
I'm really thinking everything vs everything, do you know two TUIs with a common schema that is not a convention? Literally every TUI tool I use (and I use dozens) uses its own layout and keybindings. Maybe 30% vaguely imitate vim's hjkl use instead of arrows in some of their elements, some use ? for help, that's literally about all they have in common. There's no common way for hot path traversal, almost no common paradigms at all. Trivial example, top vs htop vs bottom vs nvtop vs powertop vs god knows what else.
>Something to remember is that GUIs don't have common ground on this except on the use of Tab and Shift-Tab for jumping between different parts of the interface.
Major GUI frameworks such as Qt have hotkey schemas and conventions that are used by default in every program built with them, such as Ctrl-O for opening a file, Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y for undo and redo (which they actually provide mechanisms for), menu navigation, or Ctrl-Tab for traversing through focused tabbed elements. Plus guidelines that you can and should follow for consistency. They don't provide everything for every specialized use case but they make mundane actions common for every app predictable and consistent, and of course it's a result of practical use (new apps are being made -> framework devs canonize common behavior).
In any case, none of this is specific to GUI vs TUI as a principle, or keyboard navigation, it's rather about centralized frameworks. Nothing prevents devs from spending the energy on making a good unified TUI framework, or a GUI one that takes keyboard first in the way they want it. It's a matter of fashion more than anything. Nothing replaces good design, certainly not hiding behind the flavor of the day paradigm.