How could you forget draw.io
Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
91–100 of 172 posts
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#92> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse . This is t…
The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for…
I'm imagining a TTY-like interface that you can simultaneously type into, speak and gesture at, and whatever else I'm not thinking of (maybe with the "shell" creating a list of suggestions/ anticipating future tasks in the background based on voice input?) Doubt it would be at all practical, if only because the keyboard as a primary input device might not be as much of a thing when you can generate most code/text, but kinda fun to think about.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unicode could have just been encoded statefuly with a "current code page" mark byte. With UTF and emojis we can't have random access to characters anyways, so why not go the whole way?
Yikes. That would lose the ability to know the meaning of the current bytes, or misinterpret them badly, if you happen to get one critical byte dropped or mangled in transmission. At least UTF-8 is self-syncing: if you end up starting to read in the middle of a non-rewindable stream whose beginning has already passed, you can identify the start of the next valid codepoint sequence unambiguously, and then end up being…
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Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haven't watched the videos yet, but from the slides, it looks like part of the issue he was talking about was encodings (there's a slide illustrating UTF-16LE ve UTF-16BE, for example). Thankfully, with UTF-8 becoming the default everywhere (so that you need a really good reason not to use it for any given document), we're back at "yes, there is such a thing as plain text" again. It has a much larger set of valid cha…
The point is, a lot of work went into making that happen. I.e., plain text as it is today is not some inherent property of computing. It is a binary protocol and displaying text through fonts is also not a trivial matter. So my question is: what are we leaving on the table by over focusing on text? What about graphs and visual elements?
And what do we gain by leaving things on the table?
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The terminal is capable of flexbox now. You mean like https://silvery.dev/examples/layout.html ? This is definitely not a UI development paradigm I would have expected to see.
That’s the tip of a conceivable iceberg but exactly. Also look at kitty graphics protocol. Look at the amount of engineering resources we pour into OS GUI toolkits and then browsers. Those layers of complexity aren’t there because we stood back and said, “given what we know in 2026 how should we design a GUI compositor?”. The majority of the stack is written how it is by archeological happenstance. One generation add…
Comments like this is proof that the old-school hacker spirit is alive and kicking. This kind of pride in efficient and artful use of computers is needed more than ever.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for…
We had "opinionated" TUIs with emacs, and Omarchy will never surpass emacs' ease, shallow learning curve, and configurability. Emacs is the operating system of the future, and you can already integrate AI with it. It provides everything you need or want or don't know you want except a decent text editor.
I used emacs for years, switched to neovim last month. It's just too old and crufty for modern use, and modernizing frameworks like Doom / Spacemacs only add to the complexity. Nice modal workflows just go against emacs' nature.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's behind this new obsession with TUIs/CLIs anyway? You always had people obsessed with i3 and vim etc but this is something different.
Get used to it, because with LLMs they're here to stay forever. (Bash will possibly be fossilized forever now, like the Latin alphabet.)
Nah. Folks will be building their own shells, I'm already half the way there.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for…
I'm imagining a TTY-like interface that you can simultaneously type into, speak and gesture at, and whatever else I'm not thinking of (maybe with the "shell" creating a list of suggestions/ anticipating future tasks in the background based on voice input?) Doubt it would be at all practical, if only because the keyboard as a primary input device might not be as much of a thing when you can generate most code/text, bu…
[dead]
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haven't watched the videos yet, but from the slides, it looks like part of the issue he was talking about was encodings (there's a slide illustrating UTF-16LE ve UTF-16BE, for example). Thankfully, with UTF-8 becoming the default everywhere (so that you need a really good reason not to use it for any given document), we're back at "yes, there is such a thing as plain text" again. It has a much larger set of valid cha…
The point is, a lot of work went into making that happen. I.e., plain text as it is today is not some inherent property of computing. It is a binary protocol and displaying text through fonts is also not a trivial matter. So my question is: what are we leaving on the table by over focusing on text? What about graphs and visual elements?
TUIs can include these, see the kitty graphics protocol, implemented by most if not all modern terminals.
Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
#100It's fun to see a plaintext accounting view as the example...
I just switched from QuickBooks to Beancount+Fava for my sole proprietorship, and couldn't be happier. I've added a text-based simple invoice system, a text-based vehicle mileage tracker, and have validators that ensure that every expense with a tax status has a document attached to it.
It's far easier and faster to use than QuickBooks, I don't have to put up with ads, and with git + RFC3161 attestation of commits, I can prove I made additions when I said I made them, and there's no accidental erasures from lazy text edits, and it's a simple command to see exactly when each entry was made.
All based on plain text at the core, but I've now added Fava extensions so that I can do it all in the browser when I want. If there was a TUI fava with graphs, great, but the web isn't so bad either. Now, let's see what my accountant thinks of this...