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

Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

textual.textualize.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 113 posts

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#71

Post by chinchilla2020 »

willm wrote: post #17
eterps wrote: post #15

I prefer TUIs over GUIs primarily because TUIs are often tailored for advanced users — essentially, for professionals. In contrast, the majority of GUIs prioritize user-friendly experiences for the general consumer. When a 'TUI' begins to incorporate features like mouse-clickable buttons, drop-down menus, scrollbars, windowed interfaces (as opposed to panes & separate screens), it gradually shifts away from its core…

I don't think the two use cases are mutually exclusive. You can have that keyboard driven muscle-memory workflow, while keeping things discoverable for users who haven't committed everything to memory.

AutoCAD is a great example of something that gives both options.

New users tend to get really involved with the buttons, but gradually shift to full text control over years.

Obviously in CAD sometimes you cannot enter coordinates and must grab the mouse... but it's still faster if you minimize use of the mouse.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#72

Post by naikrovek »

eterps wrote: post #15

I prefer TUIs over GUIs primarily because TUIs are often tailored for advanced users — essentially, for professionals. In contrast, the majority of GUIs prioritize user-friendly experiences for the general consumer. When a 'TUI' begins to incorporate features like mouse-clickable buttons, drop-down menus, scrollbars, windowed interfaces (as opposed to panes & separate screens), it gradually shifts away from its core…

I wish I could accurately share my experiences watching travel agents working on mainframe terminals finding me a good deal on flights in my travel windows.

it was amazing watching them work, and there was no mouse involved. there wasn't even a mouse connected to the terminal. F-keys and hotkeys galore, and the applications were extremely responsive, none of this 400ms response from a webserver then another 1200ms waiting for the JS to render the page.

I am in favor of TUIs if they can bring this kind of accommodation for power-users. I agree with you that there is a strong danger of UX people getting involved and making things perfect for new people at the expense of anyone advanced.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#73

Post by chinchilla2020 »

This looks cool.

How long would it take me to learn and get proficient with something like this? I would use it for email, JIRA tickets, reading github code, using the github/gitlab UI (as a TUI).

Maybe even some google sheets.

As I type this I now realize most of this is probably not possible :(

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#74

Post by msla »

slmjkdbtl wrote: post #47
eterps wrote: post #15

I prefer TUIs over GUIs primarily because TUIs are often tailored for advanced users — essentially, for professionals. In contrast, the majority of GUIs prioritize user-friendly experiences for the general consumer. When a 'TUI' begins to incorporate features like mouse-clickable buttons, drop-down menus, scrollbars, windowed interfaces (as opposed to panes & separate screens), it gradually shifts away from its core…

In theory GUI is a superset of TUI, there's nothing inherently bad or unproductive about GUI. You can argue in practice there exist a lot of unproductive GUI that's worse than a TUI client, but I think it's the problem of the designer, not the tool. Also there are some areas that's universally acknowledged to be better suited for GUI, anything that requires visualization like video editing, image editing, 3d modeling…

> In theory GUI is a superset of TUI

Only if the TUI is non-scriptable. That's the big bait-and-switch possible here: Is it a TUI in that the menu system is made out of text, or is it a TUI in that it's a command line with a scripting language and the ability to create new commands out of composable pieces? Just saying "Textual User Interface" doesn't disambiguate the two.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#75

Post by gdprrrr »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #40
rollcat wrote: post #2

TUI is just a thinly disguised GUI. I mean it's pretty cool what they've done, but if it's effectively just an alternative graphical frontend (that happens to run in a terminal emulator), well I guess someone out there has a use case where they need to run this over an SSH session? Personally I find CLI ( not TUI) and/or client libraries a much more attractive proposition; otherwise a native application, that uses pr…

I wrote a TUI before for work, entirely of my own volition and for my own near-exclusive consumption (it was theoretically for anyone, but I'm the only person who would've had a reason to look at it - we were a fairly silo'd dev shop). This is what made me pick TUI over a web UI: * no web stack, period. no client/server. no js or html. this simplified the problem dramatically. also, no additional services to babysit.…

While I agree with you, I wpuld argue that the whole tty architecture is a kind of server/client system.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#76

Post by silon42 »

naikrovek wrote: post #72
eterps wrote: post #15

I prefer TUIs over GUIs primarily because TUIs are often tailored for advanced users — essentially, for professionals. In contrast, the majority of GUIs prioritize user-friendly experiences for the general consumer. When a 'TUI' begins to incorporate features like mouse-clickable buttons, drop-down menus, scrollbars, windowed interfaces (as opposed to panes & separate screens), it gradually shifts away from its core…

I wish I could accurately share my experiences watching travel agents working on mainframe terminals finding me a good deal on flights in my travel windows. it was amazing watching them work, and there was no mouse involved. there wasn't even a mouse connected to the terminal. F-keys and hotkeys galore, and the applications were extremely responsive, none of this 400ms response from a webserver then another 1200ms wa…

I've always thoght GUI designers/devs should have a Mouseless Friday (incl tochpad).

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#77

Post by qup »

adamckay wrote: post #68
eterps wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have examples where this is the case? In my experience, they've always seemed mutually exclusive.

tmux. I know the keyboard shortcuts (that I customised) to create new windows and panes, and the shortcut to resize them all equally. I've not bothered to learn / remember the keyboard shortcuts to swap pane focus or resize individual panes because I've enabled mouse support and simply click where I want to focus and drag to resize.

they're really easy defaults. like modifier and arrow key.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#78

Post by dang »

Related. Others?

Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174657 - Aug 2023 (99 comments)

Textual Paint – MS Paint in your terminal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36859880 - July 2023 (34 comments)

Textual is a beautiful Terminal User Interface library in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35123383 - March 2023 (80 comments)

Textual TUI framework for Python adds CSS renderer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33306881 - Oct 2022 (85 comments)

Things I've learned building a modern TUI framework - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32331367 - Aug 2022 (230 comments)

Textualize – A framework for building Text User Interface applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31143327 - April 2022 (99 comments)

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#79

Post by makapuf »

nine_k wrote: post #67
eterps wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is more about blending in among GUI tools, which is also important. This is what I find difficult to understand, why is that important? And to whom? It made sense 35 years ago when MS-DOS was shipped by default and you just had to make do.

Right now on my desktop I see 4 TUI windows, and 11 GUI windows. A full-featured web browser or a video chat client can't be realistically made TUI. I could have run Emacs in TUI mode, but I appreciate variable font support in non-code texts I write.

For the videochat client it could be one video window with several panes (PIP, main+side small, ...) with a textual interface for controls, chatting etc.

Re: Textual Web: TUIs for the Web

#80

Post by scandum »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #73

This looks cool. How long would it take me to learn and get proficient with something like this? I would use it for email, JIRA tickets, reading github code, using the github/gitlab UI (as a TUI). Maybe even some google sheets. As I type this I now realize most of this is probably not possible :(

I think you pointed out the problem.

I suspect it has the same problem as ncurses: Not easy to learn, get proficient with, or rapidly produce something decent with.

I've been working on a project for a while that allows running any console program within it, and use text, keyboard, or mouse triggers to add a VT100 TUI, but it's uncomfortable to learn, very hard to get proficient with, and while it's possible to rapidly produce something decent, you're going to hit a hard wall producing something excellent.

Post reply on HN