Author here - do write it up as a blog post, the discussion should be had and a bit more systematically if you don't mind me saying so, and I have quite a lot o

Author here - do write it up as a blog post, the discussion should be had and a bit more systematically if you don't mind me saying so, and I have quite a lot of things more to chime in with. Another relevant point for thought that was provided to me as a response to the original article is the design and thoughts behind https://www.eblong.com/zarf/glk https://www.eblong.com/zarf/glk - in hindsight it is more than reasonable that the interactive-fiction crowd had been working in the problem space but not attempting to generalize it. Vis a vis animations, those can still serve a certain point of they are set up for cognition rather than mere aesthetics. A simple example is switching workspaces. Some of the people I worked with refrained from having tag-sets, or tiling with workspace switching and kept a surprising amount of windows around yet knowing about compartmentalising into workspaces. The argument was a problem with finding 'where all the windows went' on a switch, and that feeling, anecdotally, went away when the workspace switching animation indicated a direction, left-to-right or right-to-left depending on if the workspace index went up or down. That is the mental grouping was not in 'specific windows -> workspace number or identifier' but a spatial place, even if not visible. While I agree between the gui/tui chasm (and often try to use text-dominant or similar phrasing - though in my head there is no real distinction between graphical and text - considering rendering emoji from a font is equivalent or darn well close to blitting tiles from a tilemap), I consider it more of a gammut where you sortof have to draw a line in the sand. The glyph+attributes in cell addressing model is much less complex than 'per pixel' even when accounting for BiDi/shaping/ligatures. Just don't mix the two which is the norm now, drawing a popup with text characters when it could've been... a friggin popup is a tragedy, and not even a good one. That said, and this touches upon the bigger idea partly hidden behind the many lines - there is a need for what could've been the 'gestalt' of the mobile "app" idea had it not drifted towards such an opportunistic, exploitative and dark-pattern filled anti-user clusterfuck, and that is the notion of a 'one thing, and well' graphical applications. I think we need both, one biased towards the graphical, one towards the textual and that they can come from the same process, just that some kind of system enforced barriers are in place so the meta-ui (window manager) doesn't degenerate into a hierarchy of nested WMs fighting to block one another's view of the system (browser to window manager to tmux to terminal to shell to virtual terminals) sortof all fight to be the same underspecified 'thing'. I document more than I disseminate, and the article belongs more in the former category, but for what I'm sortof feeling are concerns you'd enjoy in the context of the TUI discussion are two coming articles (monitor the rss, I rarely touch the browser) "rethinking desktop configuration: my UI is a filesystem" and "leveraging the display server API to bootstrap better debugging" (titles being subject to change).