bedstefar

I do. I used it in the late noughts for my cryptology BSc because I was too lazy/busy to learn TikZ proper

Were these ever sold outside the USA? This is the first time I hear about the product.

Modern (as in, since the 1980s) terminals are very capable of multiple fonts and font-sizes. I usually use a non-proportional font for coding myself.

Is that really true? Can I, in one terminal window, have prose with a serif font and code with a monospaced font at the same time? If I hover over something with my mouse, can I have a TUI tooltip at a smaller font size?

Yeah, but as far as I'm aware you get to pick one font and one size as long as the UI is laid out with literal ASCII spaces and newlines. You can't have tooltips with a smaller font, or code and prose together with monospaced/serif fonts accordingly.

I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking.

Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that.

Now, I get that a TUI can look incredibly crisp with proper text rendering, kerning, ligatures, nerd fonts and so on, but still with all that, at the end of the day we still have a thingamajig that implements a VT100. It is a strict subset of what could potentially be drawn with a proper GUI framework.

I understand that TUIs can run over SSH channels, can be juggled with Zellij/tmux/mprocs -- as such they are composable in the sense that they can be used in a way the author(s) didn't think of. It's been a while since I've done any of that personally, and I for one think it's a bit of a cop-out that the Claude Code integration in PyCharm is just the TUI [1] inside a terminal emulator inside my IDE when it could be so much more, just to provide one example.

The article shows off an strace TUI, and it's not like I can't see the benefits of making strace output more browsable. What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.

So what is the appeal? I'm asking in good faith. Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks? Is it the multi-platform aspect?

If all we work in are these super-lean TUIs maybe we don't even need so powerful computers or such high-DPI displays anymore?

I'm genuinely puzzled, but interested to know how TUIs appeal to other people.

1) which, I understand, is itself a React app with a console renderer!

That's a good tip, thanks. What I meant to say was that there's probably at least a handful of self-hosted services you could run to offset that $20/mo.

Another one could be Bitwarden, although I don't host my own password manager personally. Or netbird. You get the point

This looks like an excellent platform for running a "homelab" in the cloud (no, the irony is not lost on me) for lighter stuff like Readeck, Calibre-web, Immich. Maybe even Home Assistant too if we can find a way (Tailscale?) to get the mDNS/multicast traffic tunnelled.

... in exactly one of this planet's countries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_burn_centers_in_the_Un...

Not trying to account for the parent's claim, but generally check diskprices.com for the latest deals on Amazon (.com, .co.uk, .de, .es, .it etc)

I worked in the Arctic for the better part of a decade. There's Starlink now, but I've been TRULY OFFLINE for weeks (with plenty diesel generated power) as recently as 2018. Technically we could use Iridium at like $10 per MB, but my full Wikipedia mirror (+ Debian/Ubuntu packages, PyPI etc) did come in handy more than once.

I know some Antarctic research stations (like McMurdo for example) still have connectivity restrictions depending on time-of-day, and I wouldn't be surprised if they also had mirrors of these sort of things, and/or dual-3090 rigs for llama.cpp in the off hours.