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Building a TUI is easy now

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Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#71

Post by SatvikBeri »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #69
arjie wrote: post #65

TUIs are great fun and Claude can make beautiful ones with a little ratatui action super fast. However, the downside of these are that you can't use them with Claude Code so while I have a few I prefer to also have a prompt-response CLI function since that's better for lots of things.

Not sure if this satisfies your requirements, but I've gotten Claude Code to run commands in tmux and view their output (including debugging my NeoVim config), so I think that a TUI is at least accessible, even though it would likely bloat the context window far more than a simple CLI.

Yeah, this is my main way of using Claude Code for anything complex – a REPL or bash window in tmux, and with Claude running commands there. That lets me easily browse through anything that's happened in a UI I'm used to, or manually intervene if needed.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#72

Post by hnlmorg »

fragmede wrote: post #61
willm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible. Terminals have supported mouse interactions for a long time.

possible isn't the same as supported and working. A non-terminal hunt-and-peck typer sits down and is presented with a terminal, what's the second that happens when they're typing? they make a mistake and try to click on the word they misspelled, and it doesn't work.

That’s a very specific gripe to make. So specific that you have to acknowledge it’s not going to be a deal breaker for everyone. Which makes me wonder why you’d use the “Stockholm Syndrome” argument — assuming you used it in good faith and not just because you wanted to sound edgy (or some approximate synonym of)

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#73

Post by rgoulter »

SoftTalker wrote: post #12

I don't see any real advantage of TUIs over web forms or GUIs for the same thing. I do like CLIs though, especially the ones that are properly capable of working in pipelines. Composing a pipeline of simple command-line utilities to achieve exactly what you want is very powerful.

In practice, TUIs tend to have good keybindings, & are readily available right in the place where you're running the command (especially for quick tasks).

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#74

Post by fxtentacle »

dwb wrote: post #48

I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s…

Maybe we just need to go all the way: How about a WASM core with a React GUI that runs inside a custom Electron renderer which outputs the TUI? 100% CPU guaranteed. And you'll never find that important piece of information in an all-monochrome wall of text with no icons. Why use a low-level print() when you could improve your productivity with a high-level framework? /s

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#75

Post by arjie »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #69
arjie wrote: post #65

TUIs are great fun and Claude can make beautiful ones with a little ratatui action super fast. However, the downside of these are that you can't use them with Claude Code so while I have a few I prefer to also have a prompt-response CLI function since that's better for lots of things.

Not sure if this satisfies your requirements, but I've gotten Claude Code to run commands in tmux and view their output (including debugging my NeoVim config), so I think that a TUI is at least accessible, even though it would likely bloat the context window far more than a simple CLI.

That's pretty nice! It's just the context window problem, yes, but the tmux tip is pretty good nonetheless.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#76

Post by dddgghhbbfblk »

arjie wrote: post #65

TUIs are great fun and Claude can make beautiful ones with a little ratatui action super fast. However, the downside of these are that you can't use them with Claude Code so while I have a few I prefer to also have a prompt-response CLI function since that's better for lots of things.

The article talks about this and in fact talks about how one of the advantages of the TUI was that by combining it with `tmux capture-pane` it ended up easier for Claude to use and iterate on, not harder.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#77

Post by sunshowers »

logicprog wrote: post #67
elevation wrote: post #25

As LLMs consume all our compute resources and drive up prices for the compute hardware on which we run applications, the silver lining is that LLMs are helpful in implementing tooling without a heavy stack so it will run quickly on a lower-spec computer. I've achieved 3 and 4 orders of magnitude CPU performance boosts and 50% RAM reductions using C in places I wouldn't normally and by selecting/designing efficient da…

I suspect that a native GUI, or even something like GPUI or Flutter would be still more performant than TUI's, which are bound by the limitations of emulating terminals.

A very important thing about constraints is that they also liberate. TUIs automatically work over ssh, can be suspended with ctrl-z and such, and the keyboard focus has resulted in helpful conventions like ctrl-R that tend to not be as prominent in GUIs.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#78

Post by dwb »

fxtentacle wrote: post #74
dwb wrote: post #48

I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s…

Maybe we just need to go all the way: How about a WASM core with a React GUI that runs inside a custom Electron renderer which outputs the TUI? 100% CPU guaranteed. And you'll never find that important piece of information in an all-monochrome wall of text with no icons. Why use a low-level print() when you could improve your productivity with a high-level framework? /s

Did you reply to the correct post? Can’t see how it follows from mine.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#79

Post by euoia »

Claude Code has done a good job of building a tui MUD client (I couldn’t find one I liked), and then building a GUI version using Tauri where all the config is shared, so you can run it as either a GUI (on any platform) or TUI. Happy with it so far, and I personally use both TUI mode or GUI mode (with floating panes) depending on what I’m doing.
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