Why TUIs are back

https://wiki.alcidesfonseca.com/blog/why-tuis-are-back/

by rickcarlino • 3 months ago

425 410 3 months ago

wiki.alcidesfonseca.com

I think part of it is also that we're able to still LARP as full developers of complex systems while vibe coding by seeing an interface that makes us look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times

dbish2• 3 months ago

I’m relatively certain it’s just this at the end of the day. Everything I see people doing in their custom built TUIs or claude/codex CLI can be done, likely even easier, in a simplified IDE or easier to scan UI, but it feels nice/cool/cyberpunk/work-like to look like you’re doing more.

Everyone will have a “reasonable” explanation though for why they have to stay in the terminal even when they aren’t really coding anymore and it wouldn’t be hard to have a window next to your terminal if you really have to, but live and let live. Whatever makes you happy as be all become managers.

I too like a cyberpunk interface even if it’s last the need :)

mr_mitm3• 3 months ago

TUIs already increased in popularity before agents became a thing. The low latency, the ease of remoting and the limited screen real estate which forces the developer to carefully design the interface are genuine advantages. I've been using mutt, vim, tig, tmux, newsboat, etc for over a decade at this point, and the cyberpunk feeling faded quickly.

allthetime4• 3 months ago

It is much easier to quickly generate a usable tui for simple monitoring and management than a usable gui. Go + lipgloss + bubble tea and a single prompt will give you whatever you need in a minute or two - much faster to compile and no platform specific issues. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window

ghusto• 3 months ago

It isn't, at least for me. I choose between GUI and terminal apps based on which one is easies. Sometimes the "easy" option really isn't easy at all.

regexorcist2• 3 months ago

No it can never be the same. The terminal is about not having to switch from the keyboard. My entire workflow is tmux panes with different TUIs and terminals. Not to mention performance, with a neovim IDE you may have tens of them open in different panes for example. I wouldn't try that with VSCode.

james_marks• 3 months ago

Hot take: TUI’s default to providing utility, GUI’s are prone to extra style/bloat.

Obviously both are capable of the other.

The vanilla HTML styles look bare, so you have do _something_. TUI’s look sort of cool in their simplest form.

xiaoyu2006• 3 months ago

But GUIs are hard to built - mainly because of tech debts around all three major platforms. But nontheless displaying graphics is harder than outputting control chars.

koliber• 3 months ago

Bad UI plagued software development since ages immortal. The reason is not AI. Good UI design is a skill (or art?) and not an afterthought. But most people do not see it that way and that is why things are the way they are.

exe34• 3 months ago

since ages immortal

since time immemorial?

PunchyHamster5• 3 months ago

No, it's just misaligned incentives.

Companies make UI/UX to prioritise first 30 minutes of the experience, to keep user using it long enough that they stick with it. Not the 8h/day work the UI will get when a tool become pillar of your work.

bartread2• 3 months ago

look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times

I feel seen.

I also think there’s a certain element of reacting against absolutely everything becoming a bloated electron app.

I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.

Suro• 3 months ago

Considering the insane memory consumption of claude code running in my terminal, electron was never really the problem, bad software was the culprit all along.

MarsIronPI5• 3 months ago

Just wait till you hear about the wonders of React + Ink! Now you can have JS bloat in your terminal too!

Jokes aside, I don't understand how devs can bring themselves to ship such inefficient apps.

john01dav• 3 months ago

I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.

Claude code is almost there

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/theres-a-react-app-running-...

ornornor• 3 months ago

shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end

A significant number of these apps are nodejs apps so it’s not that much of a leap!

WD-42• 3 months ago

Claude code is react and their desktop app is Electron. But “coding is largely a solved problem”.

samgranieri2• 3 months ago

I really wish that 1Password wasn’t an electron app. Or Spotify. (Maybe I should just use Spotify in the browser).

We need to advocate and evangelize for native apps, like RapidApi on macOS and also Tower.

girvo• 3 months ago

Except most of the TUIs I’m seeing are god awful with horrible input latency because they’ve reimplemented everything from scratch in python or whatever. Multiple hundreds of ms per keystroke: it sucks.

dlivingston5• 3 months ago

I mean, I guess there's that novelty for the first few years of your career. I've been doing this a decade. I don't care about looking and feeling like a l33t h4xx0r and I doubt my peers do either.

TUIs just solve the right problems in the same world we're already working in - the terminal. That they're fast to launch and terminals have modern features like rich color and mouse support just adds to that.

sillysaurusx2• 3 months ago

I’ve been running Claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions. It’s so nice that I’m not sure I can go back. Pressing continue 15 times is surprisingly heavy, but you don’t notice till you don’t have to do it anymore.

ne8il• 3 months ago

I would try switching to Auto Mode which is their own recommendation as a safer alternative to that but still avoids needing to confirm actions endlessly: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-auto-mode

yokoprime• 3 months ago

Having worked with development since the early 2000s, I think its great that development has become more accessible and I dont particularly like that the old guard tries to gate-keep the idea of "being a developer". Being an engineer I feel requires more credentials, it always has. But if you feel like you're a developer, all the more power to you!

the__alchemist2• 3 months ago

FYI this is why I still use Vim sometimes. I am OOM more productive in JetBrains, but sometimes I have to feel like Hiro Protagonist. So, Vim it is.

jbvlkt2• 3 months ago

I have just combined those together. I use astronvim as main editor but when I need IDE I switch to Idea. I use ideavim with configuration as close as possible to astronvim. So text editing is the same for me in both programs. Modal editors are still great and they can do a lot of work that looks like magic for AI era trained developers.

arcanemachiner• 3 months ago

Sometimes I swear that people are just making up acronyms here to troll people.

I assume you mean "orders of magnitude" and not "out of memory". I have never seen the former used as an acronym before, let alone without some kind of contextual clue. (In typical Baader-Meinhof fashion, I'm sure I'll see it again in the next 24 hours...)

Cpoll• 3 months ago

Did Hiro even use a keyboard? I remember everything was VR in Snow Crash.

I, of course, pretend I'm Zero Cool.

rubslopes• 3 months ago

I thought that that was the case for me, but then I tried using Claude Code through the desktop app last week and it was so bad. Slow, glitchy... I went back to the TUI in no time.

zer0zzz• 3 months ago

Can it be much more simple of a reason and that tuis fit into many of our existing tmux based work flows?

dnnddidiej2• 3 months ago

I associate CLI prompt and typing 100wpm and lots of scrolling logs with l33t, but claude code is more 1992 DOS program vibes.

bee_rider• 3 months ago

CLI makes a lot more sense than TUI to me. A TUI program feels like a new thing to learn, a CLI program is just a new tool in my toolbox.

I can see some point to having an auto-updating dashboard or the like, though.

walrus012• 3 months ago

"Claude, write a set of scripts using bash and python that trade this $10,000 on S&P 500 listed stocks until it reaches 5 million, make no mistakes"

deadbabe• 3 months ago

I don’t understand why developers aren’t just learning to use CLIs and be comfortable with terminals even without cute little interfaces.

Are people really that put off by seeing some text on a screen and nothing more? Is tmux that difficult to learn?

sghiassy• 3 months ago

Thank you for this comment. As a principal engineer in FAANG, this the correct answer

dominotw• 3 months ago

lol most depressing comment of the day

abhinavsharma• 3 months ago

To me it's just that they're great for people who live in a terminal

- No distractions from visual content

- Extreme efficiency with keyboard

- AIs can code them up quickly. It used to be a total pain

nrmitchi• 3 months ago

- AIs can code them up quickly. It used to be a total pain

As far my opinion goes, this is biggest (and really only) reason.

mbreese2• 3 months ago

I think the corollary to this is that there are more people comfortable with living in a terminal. TUIs are more common now that there is an increased audience for them.

estimator7292• 3 months ago

There's nowhere in a TUI to add oceans of padding for a ""sleek"" and ""modern"" look. There's very very little that a product manager can ""streamline"" in 80 columns of text.

itsboring• 3 months ago

I like TUIs for a lot of reasons, but this one might be the biggest.

slopinthebag2• 3 months ago

I think TUI's are popular because they're easier to make than a GUI. They are much more constrained. A TUI is basically a wire frame with some colours, whereas with a GUI the wireframe is only the first step.

mbreese2• 3 months ago

Are you sure about that? Most GUI toolkits have things so wired up that it’s trivial to get a small app running. The point is to get a dev up and running as quickly as possible (even if there is a lot of magic involved). If you’re okay with the defaults, it ca be very quick to get a GUI up and running.

In contrast, most TUI toolkits generally require the developer to wire things up manually. Maximum developer flexibility, but with a decent learning curve. Having an LLM available to handle the initial wiring definitely speeds things up.

I know I had a few long lasting bugs with a TUI I wrote years ago that Claude was able to find the fix for pretty quickly. These were bugs that weren’t obvious to me, partially due to the arcane nature of working within a TUI.

slopinthebag2• 3 months ago

Idk, it's pretty trivial to set up a TUI with bubbletea or ratatui, and I assume other languages have similar libraries.

debarshri• 3 months ago

It was always there. k9s for instance, it started getting noticed recently. With coding agents, it is even easier to build.

droidjj• 3 months ago

The most popular claim is the memory consumption, which to be fair has been decreasing over the last decade, but my main complaint (as I usually drive a 64GB RAM MacBook Pro) is the lack of visual consistency and lack of keyboard-driven workflows.

Lucky you. I avoid electron apps because I'm limping along with 16gb.

paddy_m• 3 months ago

I think another factor is that people are rejecting the rounded corners and excessive padding of modern web design, you can't do that in a TUI, so you don't have a designer or standard practice encouraging you to do it. As implemented TUIs have greater information density than GUIs. Make no mistake though, TUIs are a decided step backwards from GUIs. Everything that you can express via text, you can also do in a text area on a GUI app.

lispisok• 3 months ago

My cynical take why TUIs are back is because people operating in the terminal became a signal that you were competent and once people figured that out everybody started doing it. The reason people were operating in the terminal is lost of them but hey it makes you look like a 1337 hacker. It's the same thing with side projects of past decades. People who had side projects cared about the craft for more than a paycheck and tended to be more competent. Then every person just trying to land a job suddenly had "side projects". Gotta have those green squares on github.

metaltyphoon• 3 months ago

My cynical take why TUIs are back is because people operating in the terminal became a signal that you were competent and once people figured that out everybody started doing it

Are you saying GUI "the real deal"?

herrherrmann• 3 months ago

There are a lot of points in there that are just generally bad in modern applications – e.g. UI inconsistencies, lack of automation and general configurability (shared ways to handle windows, layouts, keyboard shortcuts, etc.). I think it’s fair to say these things are just hugely lacking in modern operating systems. Linux might come close, but only with lots of tinkering. macOS is clearly lost and degrading now, and Windows was never close to having these qualities.

I don’t know if TUIs will be the answer, but it’s an interesting development!

GoblinSlayer6• 3 months ago

Windows has a hot key control for input and display of keyboard shortcuts https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/hot...

nickjj2• 3 months ago

I do like CLI tools and TUIs but in the article it mentions Gnome style apps don't fit the look. That sounds like a limitation of Omarchy.

It's not too bad to theme GTK apps and have them all look a consistent way. For example I use Tokyonight Moon and Gruvbox and they both have GTK themes that look great for Firefox, Thunar, GIMP, LibreOffice and more. I don't use Omarchy but here's a few screenshots https://x.com/nickjanetakis/status/2037125261657883061/photo....

Nothing fancy was done on my end, just installed the specific GTK themes. They even support live reloading because GTK's tooling supports it, my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles handle all of it for you. I still prefer TUIs but you can have nice looking GUI apps for when you want them.

d3Xt3r2• 3 months ago

Those apps you mentioned are not your typical modern GTK4/libadwaita apps, so naturally you can theme them. It's the GTK4 apps - and ones which use libadwaita specifically - that cause grief.

- Firefox: Uses its own custom rendering engine but interfaces with GTK3. It respects standard GTK3 themes.

- Thunar: Uses GTK3

- GIMP: Since v3.0, they now use GTK3

- LibreOffice: Uses its own visual framework (VCL) but has a GTK3 plugin to draw its window frame and menus, and it also respects the system theme.

None of these use libadwaita, let alone GTK4, so they're not good examples unfortunately.

nickjj2• 3 months ago

so they're not good examples unfortunately

They're some of the most popular GTK apps available. They seems like a good example to me.

The themes I'm using are compatible with GTK4 apps too.

I use niri which suggests installing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome which comes with Nautilus which is a GTK4 app. It's perfectly themed just like the GTK3 apps.

shevy-java• 3 months ago

One huge advantage that the commandline + TUIs have is ... speed.

I get more things done, in most cases, than via a GUI. In a way a TUI is a GUI of course, but with the focus on keyboard use and inputting instructions/commands. Most GUIs seem to be centered around keyboard AND mouse and then try to make things convenient here for those operations, such as drag-and-drop via the mouse.

beej713• 3 months ago

The best thing about TUIs is that they're so fast. They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast. There's a learning curve for the bazillion hotkeys, because all it is is hot keys, but when you have it, you just fly.

I've been reverting more and more: mutt (mail), newsboat (RSS), amfora (gemini protocol), gurk (Signal), chawan (web), and even trn (Usenet). My RAM usage is tiny. Everything is quick.

GUIs should take a page from the TUI playbook and consider making the app keyboard-first. Nothing is more frustrating than a missing hotkey.

fg1373• 3 months ago

Eh... no. Never underestimate people's ability to make software bloated and slow. You haven't spent enough time with Claude Code, Gemini CLI I guess.

beej713• 3 months ago

Oh, I've definitely seen the results. :) But it's nice when people don't do that.

breuleux• 3 months ago

They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast.

I don't know about that. The Gemini TUI takes like four full seconds to start on my machine. I have no idea what the hell it's doing. A lot of the fancy new TUIs that are coming on the crest of the current fad are hot garbage. I hate them.

beej713• 3 months ago

Claude Code is 600 Kloc... insanity. It's definitely possible to write crap TUIs.

PunchyHamster5• 3 months ago

GUIs are being developed for first 30 minutes of use.

It seems that barely anyone thinks about what GUI should like for app you use hours at a time for days at end.

About only software that's half decent for it are IDEs (and probably some industry-specific niche software I'm ignorant of)

refulgentis• 3 months ago

TL;DR, not from the article: Because Claude Code was a small team experiment done months after Claude Sonnet 3.7 had support for file editing; a bunch of companies had to fast follow; and the path of least resistance / collaborative work between PM and dev and design is copying, and companies are companies, they prefer money and competition over patiently waiting for X00 people to decide on a vision and deliver it.

I think it's important to note this because it's not great. Either I'm having a fever dream, or, someone will GUI this stuff and it'll be a gamechanger.

gorjusborg• 3 months ago

The real reason TUIs are back is not one reason, but a host of reasons.

The biggest current reason is fashion. Tools like Claude Code did it, and while they actually had good reasons to run in the terminal, the tools' popularity and wildly different look, especially to non-terminal-native users became a signal of some positive sort.

I don't believe that any of the rationale posed in the article is a popular reason developers are using.

onemoresoop2• 3 months ago

Fashion is a big driver for sure but TUIs do have advantages over GUIs that are real, especially for powerusers.

ohnei• 3 months ago

The TUIs I've looked at seem to be largely NPM dependent? Bizarre that agents apparently don't have time to rewrite themselves in something that isn't a security tire fire. It kind of makes me assume that all this agents taking over stuff is from people working at garbage-pivot-garbage startups that don't really have to worry about any consequences but not being fast enough.

nothinkjustai• 3 months ago

Yeah that’s the thing, pretty much all the people who are really into ai for everything are JavaScript/Typescript developers, usually working at startups, and often in the AI field.

llbbdd2• 3 months ago

AI is only good at the work I'm not paid to do

allthetime4• 3 months ago

Go + Lipgloss + Bubbletea is by far the most robust and performant stack for building (and or generating) aesthetic and usable TUIs. Excellent DX. No npm necessary

MarsIronPI5• 3 months ago

Is the Go ecosystem really that much better? As an outsider it looks like there's a fair amount of library use, more than I'd like.

llbbdd2• 3 months ago

Return to the halcyon security era of curl piped into bash

wren69913• 3 months ago

99% of LLM-adjacent software is webslop in a state of perpetually broken churn.

OpenCode for example has not yet figured out "maintain a log of all messages and send that log to the SSE endpoint in the same order to get the next response" and has regular prompt cache misses even with context pruning disabled

fithisux• 3 months ago

Next one is the NoJS movement and Gemini or even Gopher spaces.

JS literally destroyed the software landscape. All the bad practices advertised as best.

bellowsgulch• 3 months ago

A reverse shibboleth for someone who does zero professional design work is taking a screenshot of differing corner radii in macOS.

Don’t fall for this.

ricardobeat• 3 months ago

Why? All the great designers I've worked with would have shivers shooting up their spine after looking at that screenshot.

fg1373• 3 months ago

Only for software engineers who are already familiar with terminals. Most non tech people I know and in my company absolutely hate TUI. Even a fraction of software developers who spend most their time outside terminals (especially those that are on Windows and/or use specialized tools/IDEs) prefer to avoid TUIs as well.

zozbot2344• 3 months ago

Many "non-technical" folks who have interacted with virtual 3270 terminals for all sorts of mission critical tasks would disagree sharply with that assessment. And those are essentially TUIs.

fg1373• 3 months ago

Do they use it for generic computing stuff, like, reading and replying to emails, or specific tasks?

Jach• 3 months ago

And for those of us devs, they never really went anywhere. vim was the most popular editor on HN 15, 10 years ago, still very popular 5 years ago, still popular today.. and that's just an editor, all the other tools like top and its descendents never went away.. I'll believe "TUIs are back" or in some kind of uprise when I notice my non-developer friends and family using them for anything. The most dominant UI today is the mobile app, that's not changing. Limited to professional use (i.e. doing work for someone) and not all use, TUIs aren't touching either web apps or native GUIs either.

tptacek6• 3 months ago

The tide is going to turn on this in the second half of 2026. There have always been nerds who just love TUIs, and still read their email in Mutt. But I think the subtext of this article is right, that TUIs are back because of how much of a pain UI development is.

But that's changed drastically in the last few months. I spent the weekend doing SwiftUI stuff with Claude, with a lot of success. It's going to get much easier to ship fast, solid, native UIs for things, and native UI is both very fun to build and also attractive to ordinary users.

(Fun green field for doing interesting UI work: do native UI for remote server stuff, like an htop UI that uses some dialect of SSH to fetch remote data.)

I think modern TUIs are a blip. A big, important blip. But a blip. The age of the Orc is over. The time of the Human Interface Guideline has come.

dlivingston5• 3 months ago

That still doesn't address the root of the problem, which is that TUIs and Electron apps are write-once, run-anywhere, while native GUI dev is insanely fragmented.

I mean, I guess that's more or less just a summary of the blog post, but it's true. And it will remain true until the fragmentation ends, and the fragmentation won't end until Microsoft gets its act together and ships their version of SwiftUI so that some sort of abstraction layer over SwiftUI/GTK/MsftUI can be created. And since Microsoft will almost certainly never get its act together, the problem will remain.

In other words, not a blip. The UIs of the present and future will all be Electron apps and TUIs.

Ekaros3• 3 months ago

Why not instead have Linux just run Win32 applications?

tptacek6• 3 months ago

What does it matter how fragmented the platforms are? I feel like this isn't sinking in with people. I was chatting with a friend last night about a SwiftUI app that I'd built and he'd pitched in on. He then reimplemented --- didn't port it, reimplemented it, for WinUI, that night, with just a couple prompts.

I am, in a proverbial sense, buying puts on Electron.

logickkk1• 3 months ago

if ai makes native rewrites cheap, "write once run anywhere" matters a lot less. tuis stick around for dev workflows, not for shipping to users.

tptacek6• 3 months ago

I do get that, but developers like native UI too. You can tell by how much we gripe about Electron!

giancarlostoro2• 3 months ago

Because nobody is investing in native UI development. Electron is proof that if there were a simple to use GUI stack that companies would adopt it.

bbkane• 3 months ago

Contrary to what the article says ("but Google gave up on the project before a real product was launched"), I think Flutter work continues and adoption is increasing

airstrike• 3 months ago

I don't really want Dart tbh

serial_dev• 3 months ago

The article (as I read it) says that Google gave up on the new operating system (where Flutter would have been the default UI toolkit).

I’m not sure if Google actually already gave up on Fuchsia, I’d be surprised if the work actually stopped, but it’s clear now that it will not be a panacea and if it will ever get released and gets some traction, it’s still like a decade away from becoming a major OS.

giancarlostoro2• 3 months ago

One of my former coworkers / dev friend is primarly a Flutter dev, and he's about to give up on it because finding Flutter jobs has become a pain.

tootie• 3 months ago

Zed did. I know it has it's fans, but it doesn't seem to be generating a stampede of adoption despite what looks like a monumental effort to build a GUI system from the ground up.

jbvlkt2• 3 months ago

What I do not like on Zed or electron GUIs is lack of customization. Older IDEs using sdks like Swing, JWT, QT, GTK etc. allowed user to design its user interface using drag and drop. ie compare older IDEs like eclipse or idea and try to create layout which fills screen with information important for you. And then try to do the same with vscode or zed. I like functionality and speed of zed but UI customization is too limited for me. It might be design choice or sdk limit I am not sure.

landr0id• 3 months ago

Their GUI system (GPUI) is not very mature for use outside of Zed. GPUI is basically a UI framework in the truest sense: a framework for building UI... frameworks/components. It has core functionality for async execution, an ECS for grabbing shared resources, and a div.

It's basically like building a website with div and basic CSS.

gpui-component exists: https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component

Up until sometime late 2025 GPUI wasn't even on crates.io, and it seems like the GPUI-component ecosystem still promotes using git deps. It was also in "read the code for docs" state for a very long time

It's been a while since I've used it, but there were weird things missing too like the Scollbar was located in Zed's UI component crates instead of core GPUI. Arbitrary text selection also is not possible, which is something I really value about egui.

thayne3• 3 months ago

I don't think it is lack of investment necessarily, so much as not building the right thing.

What we need is a framework that is easy to use, cross platform, open source, and ideally can be used from your programming language of choice.

victorio• 3 months ago

You are not going to believe this... (joking)

einpoklum9• 3 months ago

Are the available FOSS cross-platform frameworks really not that good?

There's at least Qt, GTK, umm, and, I guess Juce and wxWindows, right? Oh, I see there are more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G...

Can you explain what's deficient about the first two I mentioned?

skydhash5• 3 months ago

cross platform

That's one word that should never been used in an design meeting. None of the GUI I've used has managed to do this right. Even Emacs and Firefox. The platform are totally different (and in the case of Linux/Unix, there's a lot of different HIG competing). So trying to be cross platform is a good illustration of the lesson in https://xkcd.com/927/

The best bet should be a core with the domain with a UI shell. And then you swap the shell according to the platform.

AlienRobot2• 3 months ago

To me the worst case is trying to develop some small utility like a tool to search in files using regex. Because if you are developing something large, the amount of time you spend dealing with packaging, distribution, etc., is small and you don't care about file sizes.

But if I want to, say, develop the app for Windows. That is easy. You get a tiny binary to just opens a form and runs with a double click. No install necessary.

The same thing on Linux? Impossible. There is no guarantee the machine has any version of GTK or Qt installed at all, so to be self-contained you need to ship the entire OS. Now your file size is huge. I can't use Python, because now Windows users need to have Python or I have to ship an interpreter.

The only plausible alternative is something like Java. Now you have a single .jar file that runs on any system. But then Oracle changed the license, and JavaFX is no longer part of Java (Swing still is).

Honestly, I just want to display a menubar with keyboard shortcuts. Why can't there be a menubar VM or something that gives me access to a menubar on all OS's without having to deal with all of this. We are already shipping the entire browser with Electron. That is stupid. The way it should work is users install a something like Flash but for desktop apps and every app just uses that platform.

It's probably easier to ship a DOS game than a desktop app because everyone who wants to run a DOS game will just have a DOS emulator installed.

polski-g2• 3 months ago

I want to say you could statically link a GUI application, but I'm pretty sure libpthread doesn't cooperate on static linking.

einpoklum9• 3 months ago

There is no guarantee the machine has any version of GTK or Qt installed at all, so to be self-contained

So don't be self-contained. I mean, you depend on an X server or Wayland, right? So why not depend on GTK or Qt being available?

(Of course, it _is_ tricky to be able to depend on any of several versions of these, but still.)

cmacleod42• 3 months ago

"worst case is trying to develop some small utility like a tool to search in files using regex" - you mean something like: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/ReacTcl+example%3A+Grv ?

This will run on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and Tcl's starkit/starpack system makes it easy to generate a single executable file for each OS that can just be copied over and run without any installation needed.

gray_-_wolf• 3 months ago

I mean, both wxWidgets and Qt are fine, no? GTK 2 and 3 as well (4+ is... meh). There are plenty applications using one of these (often via python bindings).

I think it is more of a staffing problem. Plenty of people know web development, so you want to use those people for desktop as well. Having desktop be JS (electron) helps a lot with that.

dpe822• 3 months ago

A year ago I would have agreed with you, but now anyone can build a perfectly reasonable native app.

cassepipe9• 3 months ago

The hardcore, moved to vim or emacs, trading immediate feedback and higher usability for the steepest learning curve I’ve seen

The only hard part about vim is to be forced to strecth the finger up to Escape for what is essentially the most essential function in a modal editor: Going back to command mode. The ideal workflow is do a quick edit and go back to command ("normal") mode instantly. The fact that Escape is used is a historical artifact that needs to be called out.

So just remap CapsLock to escape, it system-wide, it's not that hard and it's nice to have Escape there generally. In Linux and MacOS it's just a GUI setting away and in windows you just have to edit (create?) a registry key. Can be done on any machine under a minute.

Apart from that I don't see where the learning curve is since you can just start with the basics from vim-tutor and look up for more when you feel you're spending too much time on something. I already felt faster than in any other editor when I just knew the basics. The real problem of vim is that you get used to modal editing very quickly and it feels like the stone age when you don't have it.

mr_mitm3• 3 months ago

Unfortunately, remapping escape to caps lock can lead to serious friction if you have to work with different laptops a lot, like I do. The muscle memory gets in the way a lot.

thayne3• 3 months ago

If only keyboard makers would just always put escape there.

lucasoshiro2• 3 months ago

I always remap Caps Lock to Ctrl. I understand that Caps Lock needed to be next to Shift in typewriters, but in computers it seems like it is wasting a key in the home row for only be used sometimes for screaming (which can be done by holding shift...)

cassepipe9• 3 months ago

Which is why I never went with CapsLock being both Ctrl and Escape depending of whether it's part of a key combo because it's whole setup. On the contrary, whenever I use someone else's machine I can quickly go in the settings, set the option and then set it off after I am done.

bonsai_spool• 3 months ago

Ctrl-[ is accepted across Vim installs

jolmg• 3 months ago

Ctrl-C also works.

keithnz• 3 months ago

I map it on all my computers, works well, if I end up in an environment where I don't have the mapping I just use Ctrl-[ or stretch.

When I end up helping other devs and use their non vim setups...now that really trips me up. Capitals everywhere, random hjkls ... I have to really slow myself down when using a "normal" editor.

TranquilMarmot• 3 months ago

On macOS, this is easy. For everything else, I use mechanical keyboards that all run QMK/VIA so I remap it at the hardware level.

pilgrim0• 3 months ago

remapping capslock to esc is something nobody whom i've shamed into doing can go back from. it's just night and day. i've been thinking lately that the reason we need hjkl is vim is because the keyboard layout is actually bad for arrows. on typewriters there was no arrows, but on a computer arrows are of primary importance. i think the spacebar doesn't need to be so big, there's no reason for it to be available to both thumbs, and i think moving the small set of arrows into the left or right part of the spacebar position would be so much better for typing because the hjkl hack only work in hacker editors, but we need to use arrows a lot on normal software and it's super bad for your hand if you use it a lot. i started developing inflamations because of the way i fold my thumb to reach for the arrows without moving my entire hand.

MarsIronPI5• 3 months ago

i think the spacebar doesn't need to be so big, there's no reason for it to be available to both thumbs

This is why I love JIS, even though I don't actually need the Japanese keys. That small spacebar is so much better, and you get three extra keys (Henkan, Muhenkan and Kana) along the bottom row. As an Emacs user, I bind Henkan and Muhenkan to be Control keys. It's very comfortable.

lucasoshiro2• 3 months ago

The only hard part about vim is to be forced to strecth the finger up to Escape

I still don't understand why people keep mentioning this, ctrl-c works as well to go back to the normal mode.

windows you just have to edit (create?) a registry key

Or use Powertoys, which I don't know why it isn't a setting.

(saying as a Mac, Linux and Emacs user, although I still use Vim in the terminal)

cassepipe9• 3 months ago

Because Ctrl+C for the most important function of you editor kinda sucks ? I mean you can get used to it, but you can get used to anything. Maybe we can have nice things ?

Also just to be pedantic: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5036294/10469162

qu4z-22• 3 months ago

C-c isn't quite the same, alas, but C-[ is. (compare 5itest<esc> vs 5itest<C-c>)

tommy_axle• 3 months ago

Map to "jj" and call it a day since your finger is already on the home row

Also ctrl + [ is standard terminal/ascii for esc so that might be a bit more ergonomic than reaching for esc

cassepipe9• 3 months ago

Yes but then you get used to jj (or jk) which might not be available on other vi modes (shells vi modes, gdb, glide browser ?) and it's overall quite nice to quickly escape any situation by having the key be closer.

Ctrl + [ would be acceptable if it wasn't, imo, the most important function of the editor.

EDIT: My bad, you can do it with Glide apparently

tern2• 3 months ago

"jk" is even faster (you get to "roll" your fingers)

tuvix• 3 months ago

Not sure if this is bad form but i’ve always loved using jk for escape. It feels so natural to roll your index and middle fingers to get back to normal mode.

I agree, too, besides reminding myself to use numbers before movement commands there was really nothing that felt super hard about vim. It almost disappointed me, I always heard the jokes about not being able to quit it!

cassepipe9• 3 months ago

Yes but jk does not work in other contexts (shell vi modes at least for me) and it's actually to have Escape closer to home to quickly get out of a situation

To be fair I mostly use `/` + (n/N) + Enter with `incsearch` on (by default in nvim), I feel it's really the superior way to move around and it has deprecated a lot of my vim-fu.

In the same way, apart from occasinal `ciw` (or other text-objects), I do most of my edits with `:s/old/new`. I don't even use a complicated regex as sometimes it's just easier to write one or two simpler ones. It's just faster to not have to go to a specific location before you make an edit.

saratogacx• 3 months ago

Weirdly enough I actually like that Esc is so far away and it is not for efficiency but for ergonomics. It forces me to lift my hand up and reposition it away from the home row and back so I'm forced to move muscles that would otherwise just wait around and collect RSI points. I tend to use the arrow keys often as well for the same reason on the other hand (although I do still use hjkl quite a bit still)

redlewel2• 3 months ago

You know that CTRL + [ functions same as ESC right? Sr. dev at my job told me about this a year ago and it made vim SIGNIFICANTLY more comfortable to use day to day.

maccard3• 3 months ago

I’ve been using vim bindings for a decade and never knew this…

watsamonad• 3 months ago

I don't see where the learning curve is

Right here:

modal editor

a96• 3 months ago

The big problem is stupid guides talking about modes instead of calling it a command interpreter, which it is. Modes are an irrelevant implementation detail.

mghackerlady5• 3 months ago

From the emacs perspective, it's barely even a learning curve. If you want to use the default keybinds it takes maybe a day to get used to them (probably less on mac since it uses some of them by default already) and GNU emacs has a very nice CUA mode. Hell, if for some reason you like vi keybinds and don't use vi and don't want to use vi, emacs has a pretty good vi mode

canthonytucci• 3 months ago

If you’re on windows, powertoys is a set of first party customization utilities, one of which is a pretty nice keyboard remapper.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

b00ty4breakfast• 3 months ago

the current AI summer has been great for us dorks that prefer TUI/console interfaces. I hope it all sticks around with the inevitable cool-down in LLM hype.

j45• 3 months ago

They were never really gone, just maybe introduced to a new audience a little more lately which is great.

TacticalCoder• 3 months ago

I've got a bit of a different on it... It's because TUIs do lend themselves better to automation (it's been mentioned in the thread) and, most importantly, it's because there's less cognitive dissonance between a TUI and how it typically operates and... The way AIs are using command line tools / the terminal (or a REPL, for those using agents hooked to a REPL).

In a way AI agents are validating what us old-timers always knew: the CLI and TUIs is the most powerful way. And AI tools didn't choose the most common dev environment: devs using fat IDEs (and btw I was already using IntelliJ IDEA back when some people were still arguing NetBeans was better than IntelliJ) are way more common than those piping Unix commands to achieve even simple tasks. Instead AI tools did choose the most powerful way to work: and that's piping terminal commands and SSH/tmux/TUIs.

When the tool itself, like Claude Code CLI, is immediately showing the outputs of piped Unix commands and allowing to run commands from a prompt and is, itself, a TUI, it's validating that it's an extremely powerful way to work.

A Claude Code CLI (or similar) TUI in a tmux session is something quite powerful.

Then you combine that with the fact that techs like LSP and tree-sitter did at least partially commodotize the IDE and suddenly TUIs (or things very close to it, like GUI Emacs: which can do graphics but is still mostly used as a TUI tool) do look very appealing.

Magit is considered by many --even non Emacs user-- as the best Git interface ever. It's text, text and more text.

My life is terminals (text), Git and Magit (text), Emacs (GUI but basically text), SSH (text), tmux (text), many text things I forgot and now TUI harnesses.

If you're modelizing in Blender or editing movies or creating movies, a GUI makes sense. But if you write code, which is text, all you need is text, text and more text.

TUIs are making a comeback because it is all text and AI agents are proof of that.

personjerry• 3 months ago

TUIs are Back

Citation needed?

jrm4• 3 months ago

Nothing inherently special or even superior about TUIs, I think this very simply just speaks to "what happened" which is the fragmentation of the GUI space over the course of Microsoft v Apple v Linux v "The Web."

Seems like it could have gone differently. Feels like the time could be ripe for something like a "declarative gui spec."

ngruhn• 3 months ago

I think the come back is completely driven by Claude Code. Claude Code is a TUI, Claude Code is successful, therefore let's make everything a TUI!

I'm pretty sure the success has nothing to do with the TUI though. I personally enjoy it a lot but the productivity boast doesn't come from avoiding the mouse.

post-it• 3 months ago

It is driven by Claude Code, not because it's a TUI but because you can paste a bad TUI directly into CC and tell it to intuit what to fix, whereas uploading a screenshot is more cumbersome and less likely to be parsed correctly.

rossant• 3 months ago

I think TUIs have started to become popular again a few years ago, before Claude Code was released?

qudat• 3 months ago

I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code, everything else is background noise compared to it.

What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required.

It's a major reason why I enjoy hacking on https://pico.sh -- deploying the TUI requires zero user involvement.

_jackdk_4• 3 months ago

I don't think that's true, because it appears to me that the upswing in new TUI programs predates Claude Code's takeoff.

criley2• 3 months ago

Claude Code uses Ink, a react library in javascript for UI. The upswing is probably stuff like this making it super easy to write a TUI.

heavyset_go• 3 months ago

This is the case. The advent of libraries like Rich and others certainly helped, along with the trend of Rust TUIs for system programming/lack of good GUI options.

saidnooneever• 3 months ago

rust community likes tui ever since Ratatui and some other packages are making it easier than for example ncurses or notcurses etc. - i think Ratatui package is one big propellor for tui use and creation nowadays from slightly before claude code etc.

ctippett2• 3 months ago

I'm still motivated to adopt a TUI application in lieu of a pure CLI or GUI because of the ability to use it over SSH.

conceptme• 3 months ago

Why can't you use cli over ssh? I mean you could even do gui id you really wanted to.

agumonkey3• 3 months ago

Claude code amplified the trend hundred fold but there was already a significant increase of TUI since the days of go fzf, rust ratatui and python rich.

My bet would be a desire to do away with heavy browser based UI and the curiosity of trying to test the limits of terminal based rendering.

orbital-decay2• 3 months ago

TUI is popular because a) there are no native GUI frameworks for simple tools that are easy, fast, and simple to develop in at the same time, and b) low fidelity lets you pretend being a UI/UX developer without really being one. The rest is abysmal. It's not automatable at all (the article is wrong on that point), less readable (monospace/no images), very limited (try making a DAW in it...), relies on a ton of ancient cruft in Unix-related terminals, it's not really portable etc etc.

hsn915• 3 months ago

The TUI version of ClaudeCode is not even that good compared even to the VSCode plugin.

dnnddidiej2• 3 months ago

How come?

brabel2• 3 months ago

I use the Code tab in the Claude Desktop App and find that a superior experience since everything you expect from a desktop app works: copy/paste, undo/redo, automatic formatting of text as you type it, multiline input etc which just doesn’t in the TUI. It requires preparing th environment a little bit so that when Claude runs commands it has the same access as a terminal but I got it working easily enough.

1123581321• 3 months ago

That's why I started creating TUI apps. The cli was increasingly becoming a main view for daily work. I was using shortcuts to put the terminal side by side with other desktop apps or browser windows for context, but it was nicer to just write something that could sit in a tmux or zellij session next to claude or opencode.

It's also nice to have a little less to worry about as a desktop application developer, to be honest. The display is less nice (low text density especially) in exchange.

insane_dreamer• 3 months ago

Disagree; TUIs were already gaining steam before that.

I think the main driver was frameworks, available for a range of languages, that make it easy to create nice-looking TUIs (ratatui, textual, ink, etc.)

justinhj• 3 months ago

It's not really a tui. At least that's not the reason for its success. It's a place where a human can talk to an agent with a common language (human language) and use the computer together in an environment that works for both of us. Text commands and text results.

copperx• 3 months ago

I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code

Do you mean that TUIs are popular because everyone is now trying to imitate Claude Code? or because TUIs are now easier to develop when Claude Code exists?

bostik• 3 months ago

Likely combination of both.

CC demonstrated that one can have a powerful, flexible and responsive interface in a terminal, and to have that for a piece of software that has wide mass market appeal. I don't think we've seen this since WP5.1 . (Personal opinion: the CC terminal application beats their desktop software hands down in usability. That said, the desktop software is a lot better for corporate email trawls and helping to iterate on visualisations.)

Then for prospective devs, CC makes it easy to sling (and debug!) code that handles the various terminal vagaries with much less headache. No need to care about manually maintaining control code state machines; no worries about a missed SIGWINCH handler screwing up your in-window layout on resize or font size change; much easier integration with available CLI tools.

I have written some ncurses/C code in my time. I wouldn't want to do that by hand again.

retired• 3 months ago

Added benefit is that auth is much easier over SSH than it is over HTTP

allknowingfrog• 3 months ago

I got excited about TUIs when I was exposed to the Bubble Tea framework for Go. I'm sure that Claude has accelerated the trend, but interesting things were already happening years ago.

bmitc• 3 months ago

What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH.

This echoes my main interest in TUIs. Otherwise, I greatly prefer a good desktop application.

MisterTea2• 3 months ago

What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required.

It's a shame that a serial port typewriter emulator has somehow managed to stay alive. Instead of building new and exciting system based on new and exciting technology we get GPU accelerated typewriter emulators. It's a weird form of tech blindness mixed with nostalgia. Why arent we moving on? ssh? You can pipe whatever protocol over ssh.

I would really prefer if we moved on and worked on drawing to remote bit mapped displays. We have examples to learn from: X windows was network transparent though not a well thought out design (see audio.) Plan 9 has devdraw, an rpc based rendering engine that you load assets into then issue draw commands over the wire from a remote graphics program.

horsawlarway• 3 months ago

This has surprisingly few valid use-cases.

We see this today - there are plenty of protocols to support rendering applications over the wire (vnc, rdp, x-forwarding, waypipe, broadway, etc...)

They get very, very little usage outside of highly technical spaces. The demand just isn't there.

What did get there was the browser - which solved this problem quite nicely for basically every desired use-case, and has the benefit of offloading most of the computation to the remote device.

---

And as an aside - text remains a wonderful medium, with an incredible amount of composition and flexibility. The issue with GUI systems is that output != input. And it turns out that matters quite a bit, and is unavoidably limiting.

TremendousJudge• 3 months ago

Recently, I have used both Zed[0] and VSCode[1] remotely via SSH. It works just fine, and it was painless to set up. I remember years ago last time I tried, it was a much harder process.

[0] https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

smcleod• 3 months ago

TUIs reclaimed popularity long before Claude Code existed. Just look at the Charm ecosystem https://charm.land

krelas• 3 months ago

Hate to be this guy but it’s Xerox PARC, not Park.

furyofantares• 3 months ago

That and "loosing", but I gotta admit, I suddenly love typos and mistakes like this letting me quickly know the post wasn't fed through an LLM.

alcidesfonseca2• 3 months ago

Fixed both issues. Thanks!

monkeydust• 3 months ago

Somewhat ironic is that people are using them to create generic web apps like they are going out of fashion.

frou_dh• 3 months ago

There's something disgusting about the use of characters for graphs/charts on a bitmapped monitor. Trust nerds to find a way to make stuff ugly!

manyatoms• 3 months ago

TUIs are back because the web got too bloated.

dvhh• 3 months ago

And desktop app are tuning into bloated website

osaariki• 3 months ago

TUIs are great for low friction remote work. I do a lot of data processing work on remote VMs with a mix of interactive debugging/eyeballing and bulk jobs. TUIs are a great fit for the sorts of tools I build to support this work. The other UI paradigm I end up reaching for is locally hosted web UIs, as models are really good at one-shotting HTML reports with graphs and tables. Inside VS code those get automatically tunneled to the local machine.

rmunn4• 3 months ago

This nails it. The fact that the app interface looks exactly the same whether it's running locally or in an SSH session means I don't have to learn it twice. And while some GUI apps (VS Code for example) can be run remotely and still look the same, it takes a certain amount of ceremony to set that up. And worse, that ceremony has to be done for each app and is different for each app.

Running TUI apps over SSH isn't ceremony-less either — you have to set up SSH keys and copy your public key over into the remote end's authorized_keys file — but it's ceremony that you would have already had to do anyway to get access to the remote computer in the first place. And once that ceremony is done, you can now run any TUI (that the remote computer has installed) remotely without any more ceremony.

pelcg• 3 months ago

There are a lot of TUIs in existence worth looking at if one is interested or curious about them [0], [1], [2]

[0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

[1] https://terminaltrove.com/explore/

[2] https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix

Even before Claude Code, I always see htop as the prime example of a good TUI.

moomin• 3 months ago

Using Claude has highlighted, for me, a number of issues with terminal apps like Claude Code. You can’t easily see the status of lots of instances, you can’t easily search for instances, you can’t get one instance to start another instance or send a message from one instance to another and, of course, if you make a slightly mistake in coding a full screen app, you get screen corruption.

rmunn4• 3 months ago

if you make a slightly mistake in coding a full screen app, you get screen corruption.

HOW? The TUI library should handle everything for you. So HOW do... Wait. Did Claude vibe-code up its own set of TUI routines instead of using a library?

sombragris• 3 months ago

I fully agree about the overall downward trend in quality and efficiency of GUI apps, but I also think there's an important factor in the rise of TUI apps:

People now have access to good terminal emulators. Back in the day, you had cmd.exe in Windows. Now you have a plethora of Linux/Unix terminal emulators, Terminal.app in MacOS, and Windows Terminal in Windows 10/11. These are quite capable applications able to render good, complex text-based interfaces.

kjuulh• 3 months ago

I am conflicted on tuis they are nice, convenient and I dig the aestetic. But they're often not composeable. So even if they're there they dont feel native to the terminal. It is just an app in the terminal and that is okay, but you lose some of the terminal magic

_jackdk_4• 3 months ago

The diagnosis for GNU/Linux is better than I expected but I think is still incomplete. Yes, you have two major toolkits (GTK+ and Qt) and many minor ones (most of which wrap one of the majors). Qt is proprietary but also available under a free software licence, but what if you don't want that that complexity? It feels like modern GTK+ is less of a cross-platform toolkit and more of a runtime layer for libaidwaita and the GNOME stack. So if you don't want to conform to GNOME's UI conventions, it's not clear where else to go.

Also, the explosion of new languages in recent years means having to write a new set of FFI wrappers around existing libraries, and it's easier to make an idiomatic library for TUI development than wrap all of GTK+ or Qt.

zozbot2344• 3 months ago

The xfce folks are keeping GTK+ 3.x around, mostly for its advanced theming support. Isn't that quite enough?

_jackdk_4• 3 months ago

I didn't realise. That's good news. Whether it's enough, I don't know the UI space well enough to say.

Pay083• 3 months ago

Qt's license really isn't hard to figure out. If it's free software, you use the free software license. If it's propietary/commercial, you use the propietary license.

okanat2• 3 months ago

You can also use most of the core components (labels, buttons, grid views, image and media players) with LGPL in commercial apps. Only the more complex and more value-adding components like charts are GPL.

GoblinSlayer6• 3 months ago

I wrote bindings for gtk, it's 16kb of text. I imagine riir of curses will be much more mork.

esafak• 3 months ago

Because LLMs operate on text, and their purveyors claim natural language interfaces are the best thing since sliced bread, since that's what they sell.

gbin• 3 months ago

I don't think it is surprising. Loading entire chrome processes for simple super laggy UIs is just unbearable.

TUI are snappy, accessible over ssh, small screen friendly, easily embeddable in zellij or other multiplexers, easy to copy paste from... Amazing.

mirekrusin• 3 months ago

servo was recently published on crates – it has potential of becoming new standard; electron model proved to work very well the only downside is monstrous memory usage.

GoblinSlayer6• 3 months ago

It's well known how it works. If web browser is efficient, it just invites webdevs to spend all the extra resources until it's slow again. Wait for AI assisted mouse cursor.

pjmlp• 3 months ago

Because now we have a young generation nostalgic of their parents experience in the 1980-90's, and that includes the TUI experiences we were stuck with back in the day.

try-working• 3 months ago

The only reason CLIs and TUIs "came back" is because we're still in the early stages of this paradigm, things are moving fast and building a strong GUI UX takes just as much time as building out the backend functionality. So CLI and TUIs are used because they save time, skips the need for building a time consuming GUI. Also building UI is hard.

adamnemecek• 3 months ago

They are back because modern languages (Rust, Go) have made it pretty straight forward to build them. Ratatui and such allow you to write a TUI really quickly without needing to deal with VT100 arcana.

nharada• 3 months ago

VB6 was the peak of desktop GUI app development change my mind

timbit42• 3 months ago

Delphi.

arjie• 3 months ago

I make some things GUIs and some things TUIs. The TUIs are easier to work with Claude Code and Codex. We can co-work on many things together because the LLM harness reads TUIs very fast. You can do it with GUIs but that's much slower, and maintaining two separate interfaces into these things isn't worth the trouble.

burnto• 3 months ago

I think there’s also perhaps an organizational explanation.

A reasonable TUI can be built without any design or frontend people even looped in.

Collaboration and coordination tend to slow down processes and flatten outputs.

nickdothutton• 3 months ago

My terminal has not been ensh*ttified. I used the Internet for work, for knowledge, more than I use it for entertainment. One of the reasons I like TUIs.

dzonga• 3 months ago

ahh the classic - see one anecdote - then create a narrative that the world is changing.

if TUIs were truly back - as DHH would like you to believe - his money maker - Basecamp - would be available as a TUI, Salesforce, Workday, Bloomberg etc would be available as TUIs. Though Bloomberg is the closest to a TUI.

but let's continue to delude ourselves.

mert-kurttutan• 3 months ago

Yeah. I expected article to give much more thorough analysis and set of observations and trends. As far as the actual observation of popularity of TUI, the only relevant part is claude and codex. The rest is about his personal opinion of TUI (vs other UIs)

Nobody here (especially top comments) seems to mention this.

Very low on the actual information side.

jdw64• 3 months ago

Developers often say that TUIs are better. But this is largely a matter of taste. To be honest, outside the programmer class, how many groups of users actually like TUIs? Very few. Linux is lighter, and these days even gaming through tools like Wine/Proton has improved a lot. So why do Windows and GUI-based systems still sell more and get used more widely? Because most people prefer wrapped UIs. They prefer interfaces that visually package the system for them. Electron has real problems: memory usage, deployment bloat, and ecosystem fragmentation. But if you move too far toward TUI-first tools, your market target becomes much smaller. So the real question is: why are TUIs coming back in the AI ecosystem? My answer is: AI FOMO. Seriously, why are AI-integrated IDEs like Cursor and Antigravity becoming popular? Even when AI chat is built into the IDE, the IDE often freezes or slows down. If you just open a terminal, it is much faster. So yes, TUIs are attractive in AI workflows because they are fast, direct, remote-friendly, and easy to automate. But explaining their return only as a failure of GUI is too technical a view. There is also a social and market reason: people want access to AI workflows as quickly as possible, even if the interface is not what ordinary users would normally prefer.

mgaunard3• 3 months ago

Power users have always preferred the command-line, since expressing what you want to do as a programming language is of course much more powerful and productive than clicking menus.

To avoid context-switching from the command-line, many essential UIs were made text-only. Another route would have been to integrate the command-line within graphical applications, but few did it -- the main example that comes to mind is Jupyter.

throwaway274482• 3 months ago

TUIs don't use the command line (ie bash, fish, etc), though. They use ncurses

pocksuppet2• 3 months ago

Blender is a 3D modelling program with a scripting language in it (Python). When you open the scripting pane, it's a command line. But it doesn't try to force the whole program to be in the command line, only the part where the command line is actually useful.

Ferret7446• 3 months ago

TUIs are much closer to GUIs than CLIs. As a CLI enjoyer, I was resigned to the small win that at least many people distinguish TUI and CLI now but then I saw your comment.

There are quite a few GUIs that can be navigated with keyboard, e.g. menu bars can usually be activated with alt or win and single key presses

mgaunard3• 3 months ago

As I said, the advantage of the TUI is that they avoid context-switching.

hilti• 3 months ago

I totally agree with the author that Windows GUIs and MacOS GUIs are getting worse with every iteration. For my own side project I used ImGUI and it's working great for my purpose.

It's by far not as beautiful rendered as the native OS layers, but easy to navigate and a good foundation for cross platform GUI development. And I got it even approved for the MacOS app store. Here's my write up: https://marchildmann.com/blog/imgui-mac-app-store/

spankalee• 3 months ago

I really don't get terminal UIs that try to rebuild GUI-like functionality. Don't we think that computer interfaces should get better? We're not limited to a grid of characters to pretend to draw lines and shapes with anymore. You can't even display an image in a terminal without a non-standard terminal like Kitty or iTerm.

It's just a shame that we don't have a great cross-platform, streamed, UI system. The web is great in it's own ways, but clearly something could be a lot better for this purpose. Flutter's ok, but not on-demand enough and too married to Dart.

whartung• 3 months ago

This is because of the failure of the modern GUI environment.

They want a GUI, but, instead, they have to resort to something like this. A GUI in a TUI.

They want something portable. They want something that can run remotely. They want something they can run more safely than having to expose a socket. They don't want to have to bring up an entire desktop.

Rootless windows are effectively dead. That leaves web interfaces (and all of their issues) or doing a TUI, where all you need is an SSH connection that everyone already has.

In the past you could slap something together with Tcl/Tk, and just launch the window over X Windows. That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

The LCD is SSH, and these are the only things that fit.

cedws• 3 months ago

Agreed. I dread GUI development, hence I never build GUIs. If there were a library for my language of choice that worked multi-platform and used native components then I’d be interested.

tonyarkles• 3 months ago

That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

I was quite recently, but even then remote X is missing a really big usability piece: keeping a long-running application open on the host and periodically connecting to it from a remote node (concretely: connecting to my server from my laptop). VNC/RDP/etc all do this at the desktop level, but they're pretty mediocre experience-wise.

tmux gives me this for terminal applications without really any compromises. I run tmux for local terminals as well as remote terminals; the hotkeys are all deep muscle memory at this point. It just works.

einpoklum9• 3 months ago

That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

If you:

1. Have a low-latency connection to a decent machine, and 2. Are on a machine that's weak, or isn't yours, or that you don't fully control (e.g. employer forces you to run Windows)

... then you live in remote X apps my friend.

worik• 3 months ago

i am experimenting with TUI/GUI.

My motivation is avoiding all the piles and piles of extra software dependencies that X and/or Wayland bring in.

In addition (but might only be relevant in my niche platform) is that Wayland is buggy and X is deprecated and unmaintained making making the GUI work there a constant struggle.

Time will tell if it is an improvement

zozbot2344• 3 months ago

It's just a shame that we don't have a great cross-platform, streamed, UI system.

It's called the web/Jupyter. And no, web-driven UI doesn't have to be heavyweight either, any more than HN is.

sys_64738• 3 months ago

It's for speed over SSH text is fast. Graphical redrawing of RDP/VNC/whatever is just slower and tedious in the long run.

WhyNotHugo2• 3 months ago

really don't get terminal UIs that try to rebuild GUI-like functionality.

Because it's easy to get things done for a TUI, but if I create a proper GUI, my codebase is suddenly more complex. And it's not like there's a solid, reliable GUI toolkit that I can use, they're all riddled with different bugs and caveats.

Flutter's ok

If you ignore the absolute nightmare that is building applications in Flutter. Even Flutter itself isn't really designed to be compiled by anyone (although, in practice, your distro will shield you from this issue).

badsectoracula2• 3 months ago

You can't even display an image in a terminal without a non-standard terminal like Kitty or iTerm.

Sixels are supported by many terminals[0] (several of the terminals mentioned that do not support them are based on GNOME VTE for which support is in the works and, based on the bug tracker comments, it seems to be almost done).

This includes xterm which is probably the most "standard terminal" on X11 you can get.

[0] https://www.arewesixelyet.com/

apexalpha• 3 months ago

Shoutout to k9s. Fantastic tool.

ilaksh• 3 months ago

It's based on trends, momentum and social signaling more than anything, like most things in technology and society. Humans are herd animals.

I am affected by it also and have always been fond of TUIs in a nostalgic way.

throwaway274482• 3 months ago

Cuz they're cheap and people don't care. Same reason by electron interfaces are so common

xupybd• 3 months ago

Luke Smith was too early on this.

0xbadcafebee• 3 months ago

It's nuts that software developers are allowed to design user interfaces at all. They're incapable of making a user interface that isn't text. It's like if plumbers designed houses, they'd make all the floors slope downward, because that's the easiest way for pipes to run.

Oh we need multiple windows we can move around/resize? Let's make them text windows. We want people to be able to quickly select options? Yeah make those text boxes. We want to quickly compose documents with some kinda style/formatting? Yeah they'll need to write more text to format it (but let's not make any apps to easily view the text in formatted mode).

ninth_ant• 3 months ago

Allowed? Many if not most of these open source TUI projects were started by individuals or small teams who wanted to solve a problem for themselves.

It’s allowed. You don’t have to use them.

robinhood• 3 months ago

Wtf are you talking about? Give a developer a decent design system, and we are good to go.

mghackerlady5• 3 months ago

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have material and (to some extent) adwaita which look pretty but are absolutely useless for anything more complex than app style development or maybe a file manager

theanonymousone• 3 months ago

TUIs are extremely more portable, and offer a more uniform UX across platforms.

orbital-decay2• 3 months ago

They are so portable that Windows needs a separate terminal emulator to be able to run *nix tooling properly.

einpoklum9• 3 months ago

The bottom of the post contains an interesting suggestion, for us software developers to read one of three 'basics' books on UI: "Nielsen, Norman or Johnson".

Can someone who is more knowledgeable about these help compare and contrast these three texts a bit?

ifh-hn4• 3 months ago

I'm pretty sure dismissing flutter is ignoring reality. It, and more so dart, are not popular on HN, but it definitely is a popular and still in development truly cross platform framework.

einpoklum9• 3 months ago

Where would one go to familiarize one's self with Flutter and with dart?

ifh-hn4• 3 months ago

https://flutter.dev/

https://dart.dev/

https://dartpad.dev/

keyle2• 3 months ago

If you've done some SwiftUI or Flex or WPF or similar, Flutter is pretty easy to pick up.

Dart is really easy to pick up, it's a beautiful language imho.

alcidesfonseca2• 3 months ago

What popular desktop application is written in flutter?

Asking honestly, because none of the ones I use is.

keyle2• 3 months ago

A ton of industry applications are written in flutter. Point of sale systems, automotive interfaces, bespoke industry applications within offices, etc.

The install base would be huge, and it's a solid cross-platform option.

faangguyindia• 3 months ago

localsend

devmor• 3 months ago

I think most people are missing the forest for the trees.

TUIs are popular because once you use a piece of software that doesn't have a poorly-written GUI library full of animations bogging it down, you don't want to go back.

It's hard to make a TUI that isn't snappy, no matter how much useless eye-candy it has.

xmodem• 3 months ago

TUIs suck and the only reason they are seeing a re-surgency of relevance is because everything else sucks more along one or more critical metrics. Given the truly incomprehensible amount of CPU and GPU power we have available, this is truly a blight on our industry.

zmmmmm• 3 months ago

I think it's the smoldering ruins of the OS vendor self interest collapsing in on itself.

There's not a single good universal UI. The best is the browser and it is reasonably successful but the sandbox makes it specifically unsuitable / high friction for doing things that need local access to files, network, etc. And it is ridiculously high overhead if you just want to run something simple. Then remote access is even more a debacle. Can I access an application running on my windows host from my Mac? can I forward that through a tunneled connection?

TUI is a simple, universal protocol that does what you need and is natively remote. Whatever I use locally will seamlessly work over an SSH connection.

And it's a big middle finger to the OS vendors who thought locking everyone in by making everything incompatible or ecosystem specific was a winning strategy.

walrus012• 3 months ago

The failure of the modern absurd GUI environment (Windows 11 is a GREAT example) is why I keep coming back to something like a minimalist xfce4 desktop environment. There really isn't a need for all the absurdity.

papyrus9244• 3 months ago

I've been using openbox for decades now. It doesn't get in the way, and I don't need more.

ho_schi• 3 months ago

And TUIs

* Are simple to grasp for uses * Efficient to use (not just resource wise) * Look nice on nice terminals

Notcurses (C++) and Ratatui (Rust) did help ncurses (C) a lot.

samgranieri2• 3 months ago

I spend all day in a terminal multiplexer (zellij) with neovim and other splits. Using things like k9s / btop / lazygit / lazydocker helm / stern / whatever that systemd TUI I saw in here and started and will check out later just keeps me focused in one window, and that’s pretty cool

hombre_fatal3• 3 months ago

Also I can use the same tools on macOS and Linux machines over SSH. And I can use these tools on headless machines.

A GUI is a huge regression here.

hexo• 3 months ago

I'm not surprised at all, if I was to choose from TUI or browser-gui (electron, react, react-native, anything similar) i'd always choose TUI. Good gui design died a long ago. Almost every gui designer needs us to always look at some nonsense animations that serve zero purpose and just make you needlessly wait. There is no such thing as "essential" animation in GUI. And no, plain simple progress bar does not count as animation, but rotating "progress circle" does. GUIs got so unbelievably bloated, it used to be an advantage to have more pixels, as you could pack more information in useful way. Today? Nah. Look at signal (or signal-desktop), it's not even funny anymore. Dolphin used to be good file explorer. Today it's borderline usable, animated so much so that i have to maintain own patched version. One just cannot hide from this, mostly because devs do not understand (or want to acknowledge) need for this stuff to be configurable (instead they more likely focus on stuff no one actually needs. again looking at you, signal.). Or stuff like libadwaita that is likely one of the most arrogant take on gui library ever.

Asooka• 3 months ago

I kind of wish we had HTML but for GUI. Imagine if you had a "gui" flag in terminfo and you could send an escape sequence on stdout after which you could send out screen updates as a stripped down form of HTML on stdout and receive events on stdin. I mean something that can describe the simplest bog standard Windows 95 application with a menu bar, side bar, dialogs, buttons, and proportional text. Otherwise we could offer a GUI for applications over SSH by having the terminal open a local TCP socket connected to stdin/out and launch the user's browser, implementing the most barebones CGI.

danpalmer3• 3 months ago

HTML does describe GUIs though. Browsers are engines that turn a text description of a GUI into a rendered GUI.

I get your point, it does feel like there's something different, but I'd suggest that there is no black and white line, instead there's a spectrum, with fully native local UI at one end and fully declarative remote GUI at the other end. HTML and the web exist somewhere towards the latter.

There have been many attempts at points all the way along that line though, and every point comes with trade-offs. Performance degrades, OS-native components are eschewed, programming gets higher level, etc.

nout• 3 months ago

I think Midnight Commander is still the most advanced TUI there is. It has so many hidden capabilities that you may not even know about. You can be connected over ssh to another computer, while browsing the inside of a compressed zip file and previewing the content of the file inside of it . If you enable lynx motion and case insensitive - you are navigating across folders so much faster than just trying to "cd" and "ls"... It's impressive that this category of file managers has worked the same way for more than 40 years - the same shortcuts, etc.

danpalmer3• 3 months ago

I wish TUIs weren't back. I'll take a web interface over a TUI any day. No installing fonts that are too clever, no tweaking my terminal config to get it to display right, no guessing the navigation shortcuts that person thought was best, real text editing with OS standard text navigation, better integration with my password manager, text expander, etc...

I live on the CLI, I have one a hotkey away, but please, technology has advanced significantly since the terminal was the only option, and we have far better options for building UIs now.

stdatomic• 3 months ago

Web interfaces aren't any better. They're designed to for aesthetics and not functionality. Not to mention the fact that they all have their own UI idioms that you have to pick up on.

__alexs• 3 months ago

I spent decades using vim and Emacs but having moved to GUIs a few years ago I can't see myself going back.

This whole TUI thing just seems like a fashion trend.

neomantra• 3 months ago

They've been back and we're all taking them further than ever before!

For the past few weeks I've been wrapping up Booba [1], which is developer tooling to combine BubbleTea and Ghostty in WASM deployments (using ghostty-web).

It provides for some interesting deployment patterns both locally, over network, and embedded in a web page. It's intended to be very easy to adopt; at the simplest, one just changes `tea.NewProgram` to `booba.NewProgram`.

I used Booba to make a demo page [2] for our NTCharts TUI library published to GitHub Pages. The repo READMEs have GIFs... this page is all embedded WASM.

There's also new Kitty-Graphics-supported widgets in there (picture, chartpicture); I updated Booba and Ghostty-Web to support it. Still getting the kinks out.

[1] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/go-booba

[2] https://nimblemarkets.github.io/ntcharts/demos/heatpicture-p...

Dwedit• 3 months ago

We need lightweight HTML/JavaScript applications that aren't an entire web browser. You already have a web browser installed, you shouldn't need yet another copy of Chromium to run some HTML/JS files. Because browser makers cripple HTML files run from your own computer (can't fetch any files, even from the same directory), you are forced to start a web server just to run HTML and JS files from your own hard drive.

If you have python installed, you can start a web server with a couple lines of shell script. Is there any really good truly lightweight webserver? (Something under 256KB)

PunchyHamster5• 3 months ago

No we don't. Browsers are wrong abstraction for GUIs

jbreckmckye• 3 months ago

Take a look at Wails, Neutrino, etc.

ghc• 3 months ago

Reviewing code is important, but it's only 50% of the learning process, at best

I don't know about everyone else, but the code I reviewed as a Junior was high quality code I was expected to learn from. That's entirely different from doing code review on whatever CC outputs.

matheusmoreira• 3 months ago

Terminals are great but they seem to be turning into literal browsers and it's starting to worry me.

Ekaros3• 3 months ago

Just wait. Soon the terminal will be electron based. Showing electron running inside it somehow...

tiffanyh• 3 months ago

CLI

Dumb question and slightly off topic, but is there a reason why so many AI tools are CLIs … as opposed to just an API or another interface?

I feel like I’m missing the obvious in why there feels like an explosion of CLI tools lately, related to AI.

CyberBlaed• 3 months ago

I’d love it for my Mac if my wall paper can be a TUI app of my choice.

Interact as needed, matrix screen saver when idle to prevent burn in.

I don’t see terminal apps as heavy at all…

How to make them a wallpaper thats interactive I wonder…?

Funny if I just search it… PlashApp by Sinde, Set to Termix docker and BOOM :)

JamesStuff• 3 months ago

There is only so much rounding of borders you can do in the terminal! On a 16” MacBook, you can’t have Activity Monitor take up less than about 2/5 of the width of the screen! There is so much padding around every single element.

I don’t need pretty buttons, I need usability and readability. Without having a 50” display!

maxrev17• 3 months ago

Somewhere along the way everything got dumbed down and all the info removed. It’s some condescending ‘so dumb ppl can take it in’ marketing bs I hear from time to time. And it sucks! I also doubt it’s true. Fashion be fashion.

chvid• 3 months ago

A React app that renders to text running inside a terminal implemented using electron.

musha68k• 3 months ago

I'm biased towards CLI and reign of LLMs means we're all Unix/text (for) now. So IMO there are many reasons, but chiefly amongst them is UI/HCI design leader Apple throwing out their/industry's interaction design best practices over the last 10+ years.

Embracing constraints and "how it works" used to be at the core of their software ethos.

alex_young2• 3 months ago

CLI. Wtf is a TUI? LLMs say it has some to do with interactivity in a menu or something, but believe me, we had this all in the 80’s. Nothing new here, but the truth is the CLI is better faster and cheaper. Pick all three.

wren69913• 3 months ago

CLI is "run a command, get output, drop you back at your shell prompt". TUI is a full-screen interface inside the terminal which you stay inside of, no longer interacting with your shell.

alex_young2• 3 months ago

I think that’s what we used to call a program. Things like vi and wordstar seem like they’d qualify.

cameldrv• 3 months ago

One thing I like about TUIs is that they can usually be completely operated from the keyboard. Most GUI apps have flows that you need the mouse for, and they’re slow if have to do that often.

hebetude• 3 months ago

Some of us never switched to gui. Who wants to stop working to move a mouse around?

whatever1• 3 months ago

Because we are all working on remote machines these days. Laptops have become thin clients that run fat local electron browsers that connect to the actual computer via http / ssh.

We made our machines 100x faster and instead of running compute locally we just made 100x slower client software.

te_chris• 3 months ago

Why am I back on the terminal and 40k lines deep in my own ai-workflow tui? Two reasons: 1) AI writes my dotfiles. It fucking rules. 2) charm bracelet tui ecosystem in go is ace and ai writes it well.

aibudaev• 3 months ago

In any course, if the UI does not make any sense, the project should be failed.

Failing projects over bad UI teaches fear, not design. Good interfaces come from iteration and feedback - which is exactly what user-centered design is about

Ekaros3• 3 months ago

I think well made GUI will always be superior to TUI. And have all the same possibilities and more. But it is also very sad that now decades into this computing thing we do not have any accepted good ways to make GUIs. Or at least widespread enough ways.

CopyOnWrite3• 3 months ago

For the record: I have a terminal open at all times, my life is automated trough Bash scripts and I am a VIM / TMUX user.

With that background, most TUIs are really two steps back compared to a decent GUI. (Wild west navigation/hotekeys, broken copy and paste, lack of integration with the environment, just to name a few.)

The core of the problem is IMHO, that we really lack a decent cross platform GUI platform, which is really integrated into a programming language or part of the standard library.

Outside of Swing (which lacks access to a native browser element), we have Tk (no browser component, no drag'n'drop, at least from Tkinter), wxWidgets (seems that the community is very small and especially its bindings needed to be resurrected at least once), Qt with the ever looming possibility that it will get deshittified to make more money (... and no, KDE is not that important and I doubt the KDE community could take care of a fork long term).

Which leaves us with Electron or the other variants of 'browser component + JavaScript/CSS and callbacks to a local server, which is a really bad programming model (ignoring the memory/runtime overhead for even trivial applications).

The problem is, to build a decent cross platform gui toolkit, one needs a lot of funding and a lot of people (usability, accessibility, design, documentation, testing...). The open source community didn't manage to pull this off (GTK is by now for all practical purposes Linux only) and there is no modern contender for Qt or Swing (with their own problems).

TUIs are no solution to the core problem (and it would be absolutely possible to have a GUI toolkit with a TUI renderer for perhaps 80% of GUI needs), but I understand every developer who chooses TUIs for cross platform UIs given the alternatives.

kergonath• 3 months ago

I think you are right and completely agree with most of your points.

wxWidgets (seems that the community is very small and especially its bindings needed to be resurrected at least once)

Which is a damn shame because they are very close to native appearances on both macOS and Windows and are much easier to program than anything Qt. I think it’s the solution I prefer for multi platform GUIs, both as a user and as an occasional programmer.

Electron or the other variants of 'browser component + JavaScript/CSS and callbacks to a local server

On the other hand, I absolutely hate this as a user. I would lose features and go back to the command line rather than having to deal with this. Everything is wrong in these applications, they don’t support standard keyboard shortcuts, they look weird and out of place and lag where you least expect it.

TUIs are no solution to the core problem (and it would be absolutely possible to have a GUI toolkit with a TUI renderer for perhaps 80% of GUI needs)

There are a couple of TUI framework that are almost there already. I like the fact that they are useable without fuss over ssh and stuff but I think they are solving the wrong problem. I would rather use something like tmux but that sucks less for the windowing and persistence bits and get more focused and composable CLI. Make a simple REPL with readline so it has a standard and expected behaviour instead of trying to make everything look or behave like an IDE.

OTOH, I really like how this is driving improvement in terminal emulators.

CopyOnWrite3• 3 months ago

Thank you very much, and I also agree with your points: Electron Apps simply never feel right, even if I work within them all day (VS Code for example).

I also agree, wxWidgets is quite great, although I have to also agree with the comment above, that C++ for a GUI library is just a PITA when used from any other language. AFAIK the consumers from wxWidget (wxPython, wxErlang?, ...) are using a C wrapper around the C++ wrapper to use it.

badsectoracula2• 3 months ago

which is really integrated into a programming language or part of the standard library.

Not a programming language, but the programming language: C. The toolkit needs to be available as a C API because that lets it a) provide stable API and ABI and b) provide bindings for multiple other languages without having to jump through hoops, especially for other compiled languages (binding Qt to Python might be easy, but bindings to something like, e.g. Free Pascal requires an intermediate C++ library that exposes a C API that itself can be used from Free Pascal - and applications need to distribute it that library too).

Unfortunately the vast majority of GUI toolkits are not writtne in C but in C++ or some other language that makes using them from anything than the developers' favorite language a pain. And really the only mainstream that is written in C is GTK which has a complete disregard for proper backwards compatibility.

(you may think that a library only needs to expose a C API but it can be written in any language, however for something that doesn't have any widespread availability, you may want to link to it statically - however that can be an issue with anything outside C/C++ - as an example i recently tried to make a FLTK backend[0] for Lazarus since FLTK is a C++ library that the devs encourage to link it statically and it would allow creating GUI programs that are self-contained binaries... but statically linking a C++ library -for which i had to first make a C wrapper- in a non-C/C++ turns out to be a PITA under Linux if you are not g++ as that does passes a bunch of magic flags to the linker and impossible under Windows - or at least msys2, so i gave up).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/W6XbLkr.png

CopyOnWrite3• 3 months ago

Nicely written and I totally agree with you.

I like, that you also added backwards compatibility and ABI stability, two very important and valid points. There is to this day the joke, that the best way to write a binary GUI app for Linux is to target the Win32 API and run it via Wine, if you care for a stable platform. ;-)

jacobwiseberg• 3 months ago

I do not necessarily argue for cross-platform support, but having one such solution would help reduce the electron and TUI dependency.

I think this is the primary reason. I feel like whether or not there are good native libraries things were bound to converge into cross-platform preferencing since it's cheaper to produce and maintain.

mg794613• 3 months ago

When kubernetes got introduced, we didnt want to interact with only webpages/fronts.

So we created tooling we know on the CLI.

Every person here that thinks its AI that caused the resurgence of CLI tools is a vibe coder who just entered the scene this year.

stephschie• 3 months ago

Am I missing something: "[TUIs are] easy to automate". What am I not seeing or know about? I had to go crazy mad routes of automating TUIs with `tmux` just to get to some repeatable process.

namelosw• 3 months ago

It doesn't really make sense to me. I've been using Emacs and Vim for decades, and have been using Claude Code for months, but I moved to Codex GUI and the VSCode Claude Code plugin eventually. The biggest problem is that monospaced fonts are not really the best for reading, and with coding agents, people should be reading text most of the time.

The current implementation isn't command-line, but a re-implemented GUI in disguise, awkward and even more buggy. Why should I use that over a GUI? I would prefer Electron over those TUI unless I have to SSH.

mark_l_watson• 3 months ago

I love TUIs because so much of my dev career was ssh/mosh/tmux to remote servers and working where the fast network bandwidth and computational crunch lived.

I was vibe coding a layer on top of textual last week that allows me to plug in both interactive and information display Python functions into a TUI grid. Really simple stuff, with textual doing the heavy lifting.

perarneng• 3 months ago

Two advantages: - Deliver apps over remote - Superfast keyboard interaction (forced) One big disadvantages: - Limited graphics and advanced UI component support

I would say the optimal UI is a Keyboard driven normal Desktop app. An app that can take full advantage of graphics elements of a desktop app but is lightning fast to interact with thanks to that it's keyboard driven. Very few people build apps like that though. Sure there are keyboard hints in many apps but they are usually not 100% guaranteed to cover all cases and are sometimes an afterthought.

elzbardico2• 3 months ago

I worked in a lot of places where mainframe applications survived along with their more moder replacement for years, because experienced users were orders of magnitude more efficient using old mainframe TUIs than the clunky and slow web interfaces that replaced them.

Even in the PC world, the move from DOS based TUI programs to windows GUI in applications like POS was not without some user trauma and insatisfaction.

Gud• 3 months ago

Were they gone?

AndyMcConachie• 3 months ago

One of my first jobs was working on Telephony User Interfaces (TUIs). Everytime I see the term TUI I can't help but think of that.

For people who don't know this version of TUI, it's the ole, "Press 1 for X, Press 2 for Y" kind of interfaces that you use over a phone. Think voicemail text-to-speech and automated speech recognition.

cyberge99• 3 months ago

I have a theory that we’re moving back to TUIs because they’re responsive and will be compatible with wearables. It’s easy to overlay just text using TUI’s onto a visual portal.

tokkkie• 3 months ago

TUIs are popular not because they're TUIs, but because they're simple. We didn't need the bloat in the first place.

Timwi• 3 months ago

The article spends a lot of time talking about how UIs “look” and how they all “look different”. That's not the important aspect to me.

For me what makes a software usable in the long run (after initial learn) is shortcuts and keyboard navigability. Old GUI frameworks had built-in features for this (app-wide shortcuts, underlined letters, etc.). The web has haphazardly copied one of them (“accesskey” attribute), but now this has been completely forgotten. None of the major websites have accesskeys, even for the most frequently used element like the search bar. There are no shortcuts for frequently used functions such as “like”, “reply”, what have you. It's like developers have universally forgotten that the keyboard exists and what it can do.

TUIs don't solve that.

Why TUIs are back

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