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

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

#61

Post by freddie_mercury »

godelski wrote: post #33
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…

The obsession is because it is still the best. For all its faults, I'm still terminally terminal. The beauty of it is in the utility and how it becomes so natural. It's a language you learn that gives you so much freedom you cannot find anywhere else. I've tried many IDEs but I'll always come back to vim. It might have taken time to learn but this is true for anything else. I didn't learn a tool, I learned a language…

If it is still the best, what's the superior terminal equivalent for Photoshop, Premiere, Audacity, and Figma?

Not everyone's work life revolves around text just because yours does.

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

#62

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

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…

It's all true but they have one advantage over everything from the last two decades or so: latency. Obviously it's double lost if you try to reconstruct just the aesthetics.

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

#63

Post by rollcat »

troupo wrote: post #49
rollcat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Web model is objectively better than [...] Hard disagree. Modern web browsers are incredibly complex beasts that evolved by amalgamating decades of experimentation, poor non-standards, and elaborate counter-measures to fix that mess. I recommend reading https://browser.engineering >, or even just building Chromium from source, to gain some appreciation. Most applications would benefit from something much simpler. B…

> If you like monospaced fonts and character grids, you can probably render that with plain SDL You don't even need SDL https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

Interesting project, but you still need to hook it up to a backend to create a window to draw pixels on. SDL is likely the most portable library to do that; you could substitute fbdev, DirectX, wgpu, glfw, win32, metal, and so on.

The point is, once you have a window and a putpixel (or even better, surfaces and blitting), the rest is easy to handcraft. A standardised library would of course help.

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

#64

Post by rollcat »

tgv wrote: post #31
big_paps wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the usage of „i love x“ for x representing something inanimate you surely do not love far more unsettling..

This is getting quite off-topic, but I do love music. At least, that's how I would describe it. I just heard a fragment of something truly beautiful, and the my emotional attachment to that music is quite real (in this case, the Largo of Bach's concerto for two violins, BWV 1043; although I know someone who dismissed it as long-winding). But words tend to get nerfed, and clickbait culture certainly doesn't help. "Sla…

I would love to help bring elegance and beauty to the software we build, both on the inside and outside - and that's my main motivation behind criticising terminals and TUIs specifically.

I have vague ideas for how I could build something ergonomic, easy, and pleasant to use, but I lack experience in this area, and the focus/energy to experiment.

I'm hoping to bring this subject to the light, and have a constructive discussion. If not me, then perhaps someone else will get inspired.

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

#66

Post by maccard »

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...

The bottleneck with Skyscanner isn’t not being able to enter the dates without moving my hands, it’s waiting 30-50 seconds for all the flight options to appear, and trying to figure out “which ones are actually flights with the airplane and not third party resellers”.

Similarly with IDEs and programming - saving 0.5-2 seconds for 10-20 operations isn’t my bottleneck once I’ve decided to do the thing; waiting for the corporate antivirus to scan the chrome executable that has self updates since it last saw it, plus the VPN timeout because I haven’t logged into a corp site in 3 hours is.

Besides, visual tools can and do have very powerful shortcuts. ‘Make run’ takes longer to type than pressing F5 does, in visual studio. Photoshop, Maya, Nuke, ProTools, Final Cut, even Unity/Unreal are all graphical tools that have powerful widely used keyboard shortcuts.

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

#67

Post by nkrisc »

pdntspa wrote: post #26
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…

And can we stop calling every stupid little hobby project "beautiful" while we're at it? The word has no meaning any more.

What's interesting is nearly all words in language are on an irreversible trajectory towards abstract meaninglessness. Take your own use of the word "project" for example. Long ago, it meant "to throw or thrust" an object. Of course, today its meaning has expanded so far beyond that original meaning. That is what is happening to the word "beautiful", but the only difference is that it's happening during your lifetime, instead of long before it. You probably didn't even think about your "misuse" of the word "project" because the truth is it no longer means what it used to mean.

Perhaps 500 years from now "beautiful" (or whatever it has morphed into) will simply have a meaning similar to "pleasant".

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

#68

Post by wsintra2022 »

lionkor wrote: post #54

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?!

Second this, I opened the link and saw it was jank in my mobile browser. Why would someone not check that before showing the world? Anyway I am a fan of terminal and definitely on the bandwagon that a lot of the comments allude too. My reason; keeps fingers on the keyboard.

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

#69

Post by graemep »

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…

I saw similar in the 90s in a bank branch that was still on an old system. People who new it were very, very fast.

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

#70

Post by graemep »

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.

Its true in theory, but it does not work well in practice because:

1. Developers have to make an extra effort (and require time) to do it right 2. People are much less likely to learn the keyboard shortcuts

If you designed a GUI to be keyboard first then it might work as you say, but I cannot think of any real life examples of that. I think people need to TUI look to push them to use keyboards.

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