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Stop Making TUIs

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571–579 of 579 posts

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#571

Post by pjmlp »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #265
trueno wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a million gui frameworks under the sun and i still haven't found one that feels like what everyone has been asking for: good dx, cross platform, fast, not ugly. pick i dunno 2 or 3. tui's get to check 2 or 3 of these just like any other gui library. somehow there still isn't a silver bullet here. now i personally don't build tuis but guake style dropdown simple command and i have some other thing someone made…

Except web. Which inexplicably got all of these when no one was looking

Fast and good DX, not really, unless we are comparing it to command line tools, instead of 4 GL and RAD tools from the 1990's.

Especially when I keep bumping into Electron apps.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#572

Post by maleldil »

WA wrote: post #208
Dilettante_ wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So because TUIs look universally bad You can't stay engaged if the menus don't bleep and bloop at you and confetti rains down on every click? That's a personal problem. A minimal UI is not automatically a bad-looking UI.

No, but I want to click to place the cursor in my 10 line prompt wherever I want. I want to double click to mark words. I want to use a scroll bar. I want to copy paste properly and not "23 lines pasted". I don’t want to read docs to find all keystrokes the TUI supports to achieve what I want.

> not "23 lines pasted"

If you mean what Claude Code does when you paste longer text, you can just press Cmd-V again to show the full text.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#573

Post by mihaic »

hooch wrote: post #510
mihaic wrote: post #393

The people that keep arguing for TUIs for everything seem like religious fundamentalists that can't be convinced with any argument that user interfaces should be about the user, and need to adapt to the task at hand. Every time I use Claude Code, I'm wondering why the hell I'm regressing to the level of a machine. I paste an image that I want fixed, and I don't see the preview of it. I can't cut or edit text somewher…

Sounds like you ought to try Claude Desktop.

I would like that, inside a powerful IDE like the Jetbrains ones though.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#574

Post by d-us-vb »

bionade24 wrote: post #553
d-us-vb wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the u ubiquity of electron persists more because maintaining both web and desktop interfaces is somewhat simplified, and as a corollary, you don’t need a separate JS and C/C++/QML team. Qt has gotten pretty good, but JavaScript and typescript are easier to hire.

QML is a Javascript Superset

But it runs on Qt, which is most certainly not.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#575

Post by samspot »

grepps09 wrote: post #447
ricardobeat wrote: post #386

Hard disagree. Make more TUIs! TUIs have downsides like accessibility, poor mouse support, but work really well if you focus on keyboard input. It is a better/faster input mode to begin with, especially for power users, but also for average people; you'd be surprised at how much more user-friendly an arrow-keys driven UI can be vs modern web interfaces. I've been building my own TUI framework [1] and getting amazing…

I'm very keyboard-driven but I never really got TUIs. A GUI litterly can have just as good keyboard support, but because it doesn't force the user to use it, they rarely take the time to learn it. It's just always tempting to take the path of least resistance. Especially becuase TUIs doesn't really have any of good properties that a CLI offers such as composebility. It's still a fixed UI with panes and menus which ha…

At least with a TUI you know 100% it works with the keyboard. This is not something you can safely assume about any GUI, on the web or otherwise. Our accessibility team is kept very busy by this fact.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#576

Post by okanat »

lenkite wrote: post #230
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're comparing is really "keyboard-driven" via "mouse-drive". A GUI can be keyboard-driven and as fast as a TUI. The sad truth is that the status quo for GUIs is absolutely terrible, and most were rushed out and not properly tested to check if they're really usable without a mouse.

A GUI requires a lot more work to be keyboard-driven and as fast as a TUI.

No. Maybe web UIs do. However professional GUI libraries like WinForms, WPF, Qt come with a lot of well defined interfaces for activating menu bar, Alt+ combos, tab ordering. Just like TUIs, the developer should take time to program them. It is not a lot of work though. Most of the time it is a simple XML config change.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#577

Post by alimbada »

My servers can’t and shouldn’t run GUIs so you can take your “hot take” and stuff it... somewhere else. Choices are great to have. Advocating for fewer choices deserves the derision it’s been met with in the comments here.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#578

Post by joshka »

torginus wrote: post #568
joshka wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New protocol entirely. The existing stuff is too baked as having positioning, movement, cells as the unit of abstraction. You need to have that available, but not as the core abstraction level. The core has to be areas, words, layout, etc. Not: "move to 20, 35, start red, bold, print border characters"

Cool, thanks for answering! I don't really want to take any more of your time, is there some place I can read up on this new proposed protocol?

It's mostly something I'm thinking a bunch about recently. Nothing written up yet aside from the above. I'd go read Mitchell Hashimoto's Lobsters interview fora different take and see how that resonates with you as well as the recent blog posts about TUIs and accessibility.

Re: Stop Making TUIs

#579

Post by catlifeonmars »

pjmlp wrote: post #569
catlifeonmars wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can handle mouse events in a TUI https://ratatui.rs/concepts/backends/mouse-capture/

Yeah, already in 1990, what an achievement. /s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

I thought that UI looked vaguely familiar, and then I realized that the BIOS on many computers uses that design. I never really connected the dots.
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