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I miss the simplicity and utility of textual UIs. Nothing unneeded, and everything you need. No filler. No giant gaps between elements or wasted pixels. No

I miss the simplicity and utility of textual UIs. Nothing unneeded, and everything you need. No filler. No giant gaps between elements or wasted pixels. No fads which do silly things like hide scrollbars or other interactive elements. Except for CAD applications and some games, almost everything we do online today could be accomplished via textual UI. Almost the entire internet could be replaced with TUIs and a lot of things would be better and more straightforward, and nearly everyone would be able to do what they need to do online. TUIs are fast, they are light, they are ultra responsive and ... Yeah. They're definitely underrated. They're probably a lot easier for screen-readers, too. I'm not suggesting that we undo everything and make a TUI web, but I do want to point out that we do a hell of a lot on today's UIs that we don't need to do, solely because some designer who wants to make pretty things that function poorly said so.

rexreed 6y ago
Where's lynx when you need it? [0] [0] https://lynx.browser.org/ https://lynx.browser.org/ And I might add, it's the oldest web browser still being maintained. Since 1992.
- jeroenjanssens 6y ago
  Why does this website write "Un*x" as if it's some kind of swear word?
  - soneil 6y ago
    It's a common way to express "things that are unix-like" and avoiding the pedanticism of what is & isn't an actual UNIX™
    - jehb 6y ago
      I tend to use *nix for things that are UNIX-like. I think of un*x in the older sense from the other parent "it's not actually UNIX and f*ck the trademark" but I'm not sure that dichotomy in my mind is useful anymore.
  - roel_v 6y ago
    It was, at the time of the Unix wars, a rather childish way of 'protesting' the use of trademarks on the name 'UNIX' by AT&T, Novell, SCO etc. in their fights against other Unixy OS vendors. There were urban legends going around on IRC and Usenet that those companies would sue everybody using the word 'Unix' but not using the full name would absolve you of that responsibility. Legally this in the class of 'cops can't lie to you when you ask them if they're a cop' and 'free men doctrine' and such but it was wide spread at the time. The irony is of course that Unix-like OS vendors spend so much time fighting each other that it was basically mutually assured destruction, and proprietary Unix systems went the way of the dinosaur after the dot com crash.
SiVal 6y ago
I agree with your claims about the potential advantages of a TUI, but in this case, almost all of these TUIs using Rich will be running as GUI graphics inside a GUI window on top of a GUI OS subsystem, driven by an interpreted Python subsystem, all on an OS juggling many other simultaneous deep-stack processes. In other words, it's a keyboard-driven GUI app making use of the GUI advantages to provide you with your choice of high-quality fonts and designer colors to emulate a TUI. That doesn't make it bad. I still like it. But like you, I wish we had more options to fully exercise the power of a TUI much closer to the metal, like the old days. Apps where almost every keystroke completes an operation faster than the fastest typist can move from key to key.... Of course, beyond a certain speed, more speed wouldn't matter, so maybe I could get it by installing a (local, not remote) desktop Linux without any GUI and using only CLI dev tools. Is anyone doing this?
- iib 6y ago
  On Ubuntu, sometimes I like to do Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get into a tty, login, and then do `sudo init 3` to shutdown everything pertaining to the graphical shell. The interaction with the computer is much faster there. After I get bored, I do either `sudo init 7` to be sure, but mostly just Ctrl-Alt-F1, which brings me back to my graphical shell. This method has the advantage that you are always on the same system, not needing anything else. Oh, also the music works, if you don't kill the GUI with the first `init` call. Coupled with tmux, emacs/vim, nvlc, lynx, and coreutils, you can really be more productive there, from the extra speed, less memory requirements, and less available distractions. EDIT: I could not find the actual link to the library either on HN or in the OP, so I am linking it here [1], for the convenience of myself and others. [1] https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich
  - teddyh 6y ago
    > sudo init 3` to shutdown everything pertaining to the graphical shell The modern systemd equivalent is: systemctl isolate multi-user > sudo init 7 […] which brings me back to my graphical shell. systemctl isolate graphical or systemctl isolate default
xingyzt 6y ago
> They're probably a lot easier for screen-readers, too. That might be true for more minimal TUIs, but I don't think most screen-readers can handle the multi-paneled ones like OP.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  They could if the TUI had runtime/library designed for it. Emacs as a platform is a good example here - the TUI that you can achieve in it is similar to web GUIs made of standard components - in the the UI isn't just pixels on a 256-bit canvas, but it's made of building blocks that you can inspect, select, copy, and that gracefully enhance/degrade when you switch between graphical and terminal modes.
CJefferson 6y ago
One thing, TUIs are MUCH MUCH worse for screen readers than (well made) websites. TUIs (as currently designed) have no structure, so it's very difficult to move around from section to section. A website with headers and auto-wrapping text is much easier to move around and read with a screen reader.
- acapybara 6y ago
  At one point, web designers were making an effort to use semantic markup and create a "semantic web." That sure would have been nice for the screen readers.
  - CJefferson 6y ago
    In practice, much of the modern web still works well with screen readers (although it could be better of course). Some things break horribly (in particular, infinite scrolling is often a problem).
- ta988 6y ago
  On the other hand, emacs works really well with emacsspeak. So it is possible.
zokier 6y ago
> No giant gaps between elements or wasted pixels. No fads which do silly things like hide scrollbars or other interactive elements I call bullshit on this. Using fixed character cell grid for UI absolutely wastes ton of space. First of all just basic text takes more space in fixed-width than variable width. But the biggest offender is any layout or ui elements that would not need whole cell. Even basic 1px horizontal line takes 10px of height or whatever. Places where 1 or 2 px padding could do will use full cell instead. And then there is of course the space waste from forcing all text to be same size. For tons of applications the UI elements could do with smaller font than content, but none of that is possible with TUI. I find your example of hiding scrollbars hilarious, considering that TUIs are in general far worse offenders in that area specifically. For example none of the examples for Rich here show scrollbars.. I do also believe that in terms of performance TUIs leave lot on the table, because they are forced to go through all sort of weird legacy layers. Pushing pixels on screen and receiving key events directly almost certainly should be faster/more efficient than going through tty layer and terminal emulation.
- bityard 6y ago
  > Pushing pixels on screen and receiving key events directly almost certainly should be faster/more efficient than going through tty layer and terminal emulation. Why do you think it needs to be faster? Do you currently have issues with complexity or latency? Have you measured it? Do you think that replacing the current abstractions with new abstractions will really be a net improvement? A terminal emulator is pretty much the least non-trivial resource-intensive graphical application I can think of. I've been running Linux on the desktop for over two decades and can't think of a single time I thought the terminal emulator I was using at the time was too slow. (Which is why I don't really understand the need for CPU-accelerated terminal emulators, but that's a different kettle of worms.)
- rabidrat 6y ago
  > Even basic 1px horizontal line takes 10px of height or whatever. Places where 1 or 2 px padding could do will use full cell instead. This is not true; there is an underline attribute which can add a ~1px horizontal line without taking up any additional space.
invalidToken 6y ago
as a person who has the basic HTML version of gmail as his default, I understand.

rexreed 6y ago

Where's lynx when you need it? [0] [0] https://lynx.browser.org/ https://lynx.browser.org/ And I might add, it's the oldest web browser still being maintained. Since 1992.

jeroenjanssens 6y ago
Why does this website write "Un*x" as if it's some kind of swear word?
- soneil 6y ago
  It's a common way to express "things that are unix-like" and avoiding the pedanticism of what is & isn't an actual UNIX™
  - jehb 6y ago
    I tend to use *nix for things that are UNIX-like. I think of un*x in the older sense from the other parent "it's not actually UNIX and f*ck the trademark" but I'm not sure that dichotomy in my mind is useful anymore.
- roel_v 6y ago
  It was, at the time of the Unix wars, a rather childish way of 'protesting' the use of trademarks on the name 'UNIX' by AT&T, Novell, SCO etc. in their fights against other Unixy OS vendors. There were urban legends going around on IRC and Usenet that those companies would sue everybody using the word 'Unix' but not using the full name would absolve you of that responsibility. Legally this in the class of 'cops can't lie to you when you ask them if they're a cop' and 'free men doctrine' and such but it was wide spread at the time. The irony is of course that Unix-like OS vendors spend so much time fighting each other that it was basically mutually assured destruction, and proprietary Unix systems went the way of the dinosaur after the dot com crash.

SiVal 6y ago

I agree with your claims about the potential advantages of a TUI, but in this case, almost all of these TUIs using Rich will be running as GUI graphics inside a GUI window on top of a GUI OS subsystem, driven by an interpreted Python subsystem, all on an OS juggling many other simultaneous deep-stack processes. In other words, it's a keyboard-driven GUI app making use of the GUI advantages to provide you with your choice of high-quality fonts and designer colors to emulate a TUI. That doesn't make it bad. I still like it. But like you, I wish we had more options to fully exercise the power of a TUI much closer to the metal, like the old days. Apps where almost every keystroke completes an operation faster than the fastest typist can move from key to key.... Of course, beyond a certain speed, more speed wouldn't matter, so maybe I could get it by installing a (local, not remote) desktop Linux without any GUI and using only CLI dev tools. Is anyone doing this?

iib 6y ago
On Ubuntu, sometimes I like to do Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get into a tty, login, and then do `sudo init 3` to shutdown everything pertaining to the graphical shell. The interaction with the computer is much faster there. After I get bored, I do either `sudo init 7` to be sure, but mostly just Ctrl-Alt-F1, which brings me back to my graphical shell. This method has the advantage that you are always on the same system, not needing anything else. Oh, also the music works, if you don't kill the GUI with the first `init` call. Coupled with tmux, emacs/vim, nvlc, lynx, and coreutils, you can really be more productive there, from the extra speed, less memory requirements, and less available distractions. EDIT: I could not find the actual link to the library either on HN or in the OP, so I am linking it here [1], for the convenience of myself and others. [1] https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich
- teddyh 6y ago
  > sudo init 3` to shutdown everything pertaining to the graphical shell The modern systemd equivalent is: systemctl isolate multi-user > sudo init 7 […] which brings me back to my graphical shell. systemctl isolate graphical or systemctl isolate default

xingyzt 6y ago

> They're probably a lot easier for screen-readers, too. That might be true for more minimal TUIs, but I don't think most screen-readers can handle the multi-paneled ones like OP.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
They could if the TUI had runtime/library designed for it. Emacs as a platform is a good example here - the TUI that you can achieve in it is similar to web GUIs made of standard components - in the the UI isn't just pixels on a 256-bit canvas, but it's made of building blocks that you can inspect, select, copy, and that gracefully enhance/degrade when you switch between graphical and terminal modes.

CJefferson 6y ago

One thing, TUIs are MUCH MUCH worse for screen readers than (well made) websites. TUIs (as currently designed) have no structure, so it's very difficult to move around from section to section. A website with headers and auto-wrapping text is much easier to move around and read with a screen reader.

acapybara 6y ago
At one point, web designers were making an effort to use semantic markup and create a "semantic web." That sure would have been nice for the screen readers.
- CJefferson 6y ago
  In practice, much of the modern web still works well with screen readers (although it could be better of course). Some things break horribly (in particular, infinite scrolling is often a problem).
ta988 6y ago
On the other hand, emacs works really well with emacsspeak. So it is possible.

zokier 6y ago

> No giant gaps between elements or wasted pixels. No fads which do silly things like hide scrollbars or other interactive elements I call bullshit on this. Using fixed character cell grid for UI absolutely wastes ton of space. First of all just basic text takes more space in fixed-width than variable width. But the biggest offender is any layout or ui elements that would not need whole cell. Even basic 1px horizontal line takes 10px of height or whatever. Places where 1 or 2 px padding could do will use full cell instead. And then there is of course the space waste from forcing all text to be same size. For tons of applications the UI elements could do with smaller font than content, but none of that is possible with TUI. I find your example of hiding scrollbars hilarious, considering that TUIs are in general far worse offenders in that area specifically. For example none of the examples for Rich here show scrollbars.. I do also believe that in terms of performance TUIs leave lot on the table, because they are forced to go through all sort of weird legacy layers. Pushing pixels on screen and receiving key events directly almost certainly should be faster/more efficient than going through tty layer and terminal emulation.

bityard 6y ago
> Pushing pixels on screen and receiving key events directly almost certainly should be faster/more efficient than going through tty layer and terminal emulation. Why do you think it needs to be faster? Do you currently have issues with complexity or latency? Have you measured it? Do you think that replacing the current abstractions with new abstractions will really be a net improvement? A terminal emulator is pretty much the least non-trivial resource-intensive graphical application I can think of. I've been running Linux on the desktop for over two decades and can't think of a single time I thought the terminal emulator I was using at the time was too slow. (Which is why I don't really understand the need for CPU-accelerated terminal emulators, but that's a different kettle of worms.)
rabidrat 6y ago
> Even basic 1px horizontal line takes 10px of height or whatever. Places where 1 or 2 px padding could do will use full cell instead. This is not true; there is an underline attribute which can add a ~1px horizontal line without taking up any additional space.

invalidToken 6y ago

as a person who has the basic HTML version of gmail as his default, I understand.