Stop Making TUIs

Surac

TUI is a kind of self defense. big corps create and kill gui frameworks faster that one can learn them. Browser based ui is a real waste of resources (and also evolve in a absurd pace). The Console is a last resort to write small (understandable) gui that work on many platforms.

jmorenoamor

No. I like them.

GreenSalem

Incoherent and far too long . Lists a bunch of things . Fails to make any clear points . Fails to give real reasons for the few claims it makes .

kunley

What is the complaint in the article really about? People write code using the platform X because they like it. It doesn't make sense to try to stop this

JoshTriplett

You know what's awesome about TUIs? They live in a tab in my terminal. 95% of the time, my system has three windows open: terminal, browser, Signal. Please, make more TUIs and web apps, so they can live in my terminal or my browser.

burnoutdv

I am team TUI for the matter. Its also a bit funny how the author show cases a bunch of apps that only exist on a very specific setup, IOS Mac devices while TUI can exist everywhere a terminal can reach. The right tool for the right job, noone would srsly use a TUI photoeditor but for many things the simplicity and constraints that a terminal introduces condenses design. I got this article about UI density open since weeks and meant to read it https://mattstromawn.com/writing/ui-density/ But from what I could interfere so far..more UI frameworks, more white space, more wasted space. Also..TUIs usually allow me a wide variety of colorschemes out of the box which is nice

gemisis

Hot take: Too many people are building GUIs for what should just be a TUI, and vice versa My stances: - Dev tools need a CLI at minimum, TUI for complexity - User facing needs a GUI, CLI for power users If you're building a TUI for a user facing thing, then yeah, you're doing it wrong, but if your target audience is devs then yes, PLEASE do a TUI, and make it nice.

rochak

Or, you know what, don't listen to strangers on internet telling you what you should do. Do what you want.

hombre_fatal

One of the biggest upsides of TUIs over GUIs is that I can run any number of TUI instances. Meanwhile a GUI's developer has to decide to grace me with the ability to even open more than one window. "A tabbed interface will be sufficient!" -- yay, I'll never be able to view two screens of info at the same time.

self_awareness

Do more TUIs. People are unable to do good GUIs. The web shows this; completely disregarding any UI guidelines by web people established since 80s is a proof that most people have no idea how to make GUIs. I don't know how to make a good GUI. That's why I need good templates and strong guidelines, discipline and spend long time on design. Most people don't do that. TUI is much, much easier. It's also possible to do bad TUIs, but it's easier to do a good TUI than to do an average GUI.

FabCH

Counterpoint: Build more TUIs in Rust using Ratatui: https://ratatui.rs/ Why? Because just look at the examples on that page.

jesse_dot_id

I'm a fan of a TUI, I think because they are usually pretty intuitive out of necessity. I can usually feel the developer's skill level in the user experience.

zorked

Haha, no. For a while, many years ago, it seemed TUIs were indeed on the way out, but then they were relived by the awesome work of people who wrote GPU-accelerated terminals, widget libraries, who extended terminals with more colors and the ability to show Unicode and graphics. I salute you, heros.

lukasbm

TUIs are just an accessibility nightmare without any of the advantages of a CLI like scriptability. Truly, Truly horrible

smcleod

I absolutely love TUIs, they can live in a pane in my terminal, run via SSH on remote machines, use hardly any resources and are very flexible.

x0xMaximus

aerc is the best program I've ever used. tmux from anywhere. May TUIs never die.

zmmmmm

Make more TUIs .... The main thing I like is that TUIs are guaranteed to be navigable by keyboard. So many non-TUI apps don't include shortcuts at all for critical actions. It makes the first week of using the app more efficient and the entire rest of your life less so. Add on to that, I can probably run a TUI on my server. Or my cloud instance. And in my sandbox. Over SSH. So: do make TUIs and bind their keys to Vi-like shortcuts as much as possible and I will use your app every time over a GUI app. Pro tip for Mac users - install Karabiner and bind right-Alt + jklm to cursor movements. Immediate VIM navigation through the whole OS.

skeledrew

Making TUIs isn't the issue. Making them with JS/TS, and in general an ecosystem designed for the web, is the problem. I've used some really good TUI apps in the past, but all these new ones mostly based on web tech are just... sloppily bad. Probably because the dev would rather be in the web browser where it's naturally colorful and scripts can run wild, but mostly-static terminal is where things are currently at. And they're using LLMs, which don't have sufficient data on web-tech-in-terminal since it wasn't really a thing until now, which also ensures they will likely never gain enough data on decent patterns since almost nobody will be engineering said patterns, creating a permanently slop-ridden cycle as future models only have slop projects to learn from.

PaulRobinson

Yesterday I was flipping between some TUIs, native apps, web apps and an electron app. I think it was only because I was trying to do a lot in each of them I became really aware of the latency lag in some of these. There are real advantages of TUIs: less CPU; sometimes I want to be using a personal TUI on a personal dev server quickly from a work laptop at lunchtime and an ssh + tmux + TUI is perfect; most modern TUI libraries are significantly less painful to work with than most modern web app frontend libraries; I can change the font size of my terminal easily if I need to, more easily than native (but not web app). But by far the biggest, is they just generally tend to be very fast and responsive compared to everything else.

picafrost

Are there not disparities between running an application in the terminal and running a native GUI? I can only speak for macOS, but my experience with bespoke native GUI applications of my own or other developers (pre-built distributions in GitHub assets) is that I must first pass through the layers of the macOS security model: doing a right-click dance to launch the application, changing permissions in security settings, etc. I assume the experience is different depending on how you set up Xcode to compile, how it's signed, etc (I have zero experience with how this works). That said, I do not recall being subjected to any of this using terminal applications. Put differently, a GUI application seems to subject you far more to the whims of Apple or Windows than a TUI and perhaps even a different run context. Maybe the permissions fiddling for this is insignificant. Is there a clear user contract from Apple or Microsoft about this? Naturally, this is a non-issue in Linux.