16 ms·

TUIs

557 points by andrewstuart 5y ago

srott 5y ago
My personal favorite: https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed
soapdog 5y ago
I know that people love their TUIs, especially people working on tiling WM in Linux, I understand them, but I still think that the best TUIs of all time were the products developed by Borland for DOS. The Turbo Vision libraries and the apps built with them are still the gold standard in my heart.
- rahen 5y ago
  Indeed, I have fond memories of the Turbo C IDE. I wish conio.h would have been something under Unix, free from the VT100 cruft. ncurses is lacking and awkward to use. Apparently conio.h was ported to Linux (https://github.com/nowres/conio-for-linux https://github.com/nowres/conio-for-linux) but I don't think it ever was a popular option.
- password4321 5y ago
  Modern Turbo Vision 2.0 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732274
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  FWIW Free Vision is basically an improved Turbo Vision for Free Pascal, it recently (as in, last month) even got unicode support[0]. Though it is a bit weird in that it uses the TP5.5-style objects which aren't as powerful as the Delphi-style objects (very roughly think class in C++ vs class in Java). The (sadly only German) tutorial linked by the wiki has a bunch of screenshots in a terminal. [0] https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Free_Vision#Unicode_version https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Free_Vision#Unicode_vers...
pech0rin 5y ago
I wonder for the reason of all these list repos in the past few years. It would awesome if there was a better way to search repos. Maybe semantically in a way that you had a problem to solve and it would suggest open source projects. I think its cool to see lists of projects but I dont find it super helpful, am I supposed to bookmark 20 repos which each list another 1000 repos? There has to be a better way for discoverability.
- kevinsundar 5y ago
  It goes deeper haha https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
- armchairhacker 5y ago
  Wiki pages. A repo containing README.md is a primitive wiki page. And with GitHub you can contribute (pull requests) or discuss meta (issues). But a page on Wikipedia or something like it be better. But, it's harder to create such a wiki then a GitHub repo (which most devs are already familiar with). And it might not show up as high on SEO. So GitHub repo it is.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Github still has atom feeds for repos, for example: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis/commits/master.atom https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis/commits/master.atom Unfortunately they don't really make links to these feeds very visible in the UI anymore. But toss that in your feed reader of choice and you'll get an update when the awesome list content changes.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  > It would awesome if there was a better way to search repos. Not having that is kinda the whole value proposition of Big Data. Github gives you free bandwidth and disk space. In return they get to "grep like a boss" running complex queries with no fuzziness; you don't. Similar story with search engines and their crawler output. And Amazon's product catalog. None of these let you turn off the fuzziness and run large/frequent/complex queries, even if you're willing to pay for it. Amazon's "good" product search API is ratelimited by how many convertible leads you send them. I dunno, it's kinda lame, but I guess that's how things work.
pcr910303 5y ago
CLIs (that read input from stdin and spit out results to stdout/stderr) are useful in an automation/data processing pipeline. But TUIs are a gimmick that should have been just GUIs. (And text selection is not a reason to resort to TUIs — it’s a reason to improve GUIs.) Unfortunately native GUI programming doesn’t have the coolness/geekiness factor of TUI apps… Edit: Looks like I should clarify – I'm not saying that people should stop creating TUIs right now: in the current landscape, TUIs do have advantages like being usable over ssh, text selection, a simpler programming model in most languages... but I'm arguing that these advantages aren't inherent to TUIs. We should aim to improve GUIs, not stuck in a interface from the 70s. Unfortunately I've seen too many people (including a big chunk of HN) that argue that TUIs are just inherently superior.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  I can make a TUI by just reading from stdin, writing to stdout, and some minimal parsing and emitting of VT codes that have mostly not changed in a few decades. To make a GUI I have to pull in megabytes of libraries, learn their API, then update them every time they release a new version that will likely have breaking changes. They'll also have questionable bindings outside of one or two "first-class" languages, so reading docs and investigating why something isn't working is harder. I'll stick with TUIs, thanks.
  - hahajk 5y ago
    Web interfaces are the GUI equivalent of the simple, timeless tty interface. My 10 year old router still renders html just fine on modern Chrome.
    - Arnavion 5y ago
      Yes, but at the cost of needing to run a browser. In this modern era of everyone fetishizing single-instance applications, a browser crash caused by one tab would mean I lose not only all my open websites but also all these "apps". I have to `pkill -9` firefox once every few days because of bugs; a few months ago it used to break the clipboard until it was restarted, these days it freezes when dragging tabs around in the tab bar, tomorrow I'm sure it'll be some new bug... I'm glad I don't lose my editor / IDE / chat clients / monitoring dashboards when this happens.
nodesocket 5y ago
One of the most useful for me is McFly[1] which is not listed. McFly provides a nice U/I on top of history search. Works with both bash and zsh shells. You can remove entries from your history as well all within the McFly U/I. Game changer. [1] https://github.com/cantino/mcfly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly
armchairhacker 5y ago
TUIs are very pretty and very convenient. Unfortunately rendering to the Terminal is...slow. See https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh. Honestly I wonder if there is a way to speed it up. Like a new terminal mode which lets you write or color a particular row/column directly, or utilizes the GPU to render to each pixel, or really anything better than literally printing text with fancy spacing, escapes, etc. on each refresh. Until then, anything which is render-intensive you're much better using a GUI, even if it's just a shell script which opens a window while it's running.
- theamk 5y ago
  As long as you don't send video/graphics, most of the terminals are limited by the link bandwidth, as opposed to rendering performance. And if you are sending video or animated graphics, then perhaps a special video-orented protocol is a much better choice. Like that browsh project - I am fairly sure the performance would be much better with special protocol.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Perfectly emulating pixel graphics with a TUI isn't really the point. The point is to simplify an interface to the most essential text. Look at lynx or elinks for an example of a more realistic and usable TUI web browser. It doesn't try to play youtube videos, it just extracts the text and content from a site to display it. But to your question, yes there are 'text' console bitmap graphics protocols. Check out sixel for one example: https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ Some terminal emulators support other bitmap graphics too.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The point of things like sixel is to efficiently support interfaces where text is mixed with a little bit of graphics, like in many old-style apps of the 1980s and 1990s - they work very well for that. Replicating a full-featured GUI though is kinda outside their scope; you could make it work but it's not really the point.
dboreham 5y ago
Grumble. TUI means Telephony User Interface.
eek2121 5y ago
Steam TUI! I always wanted to make something like that. Glad to know I don't need to.
miguelmurca 5y ago
Surprised scli isn't in there. It's one of the few pieces of software that I'll actually advocate for: super stable, great bindings if you're coming from vim, and surprisingly complete. Also since the desktop app for Signal is hot garbage, it's really a must for me. [1] https://github.com/isamert/scli/ https://github.com/isamert/scli/
- miguelmurca 5y ago
  Also sup-mail, which I found much more usable than mutt, neomutt, or alpine.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    If you like sup-mail, I recommend also trying notmuch via alot. https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/ https://github.com/pazz/alot https://github.com/pazz/alot There are other options if you don't like alot. See: https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  You're a godsend. I've been trying to hack together a tiling desktop and trying to focus on CLI and tui options, the Frankenstein of graphical and tui applications is not quite what I'd prefer. And the signal electron app is 100% hot garbage, I wont use it regardless anymore. Gonna check this out.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Another option would be to bridge signal to Matrix (along with other networks as I do) and then use gomuks. It's pretty neat for TUI and can even show low Res images.I have WhatsApp, telegram and signal bridged. There's a really great ansible playbook that'll set it all up for you. I do this because this way I can have all my chat apps in one app and also all the chart histories together in one database. But scli is pretty nice too yeah.
    - 5y ago
layer8 5y ago
Any opinions on lazygit vs. tig vs. gitui?
- dpatterbee 5y ago
  I'm a big fan of lazygit. I would describe myself as highly competent in using the git cli, but lazygit just makes most common operations so much faster that I'd hate to go back to only using the cli.
  - rplnt 5y ago
    Same here. I still combine both, but over time used lazygit more and more. I still only use a few features: view diffs, staging and resetting files, commit and push. One disclaimer though: I'm using version 0.14. Starting with 0.17 or so the UI got a bit too noisy (loads of colors), but most importantly the tool got extremely slow. Like the startup time jumped from not noticeable at all to several seconds, which is absolutely unusable for what I need the tool for. Since it was a real pain to downgrade I haven't tried newer versions since. Maybe it's fixed, I don't know and I have no desire to find out.
    - dpatterbee 5y ago
      Interesting, I haven't noticed any performance issues, and I'm currently running version 0.31.4. Perhaps the issues you're talking about were fixed. Regarding the colours, I personally like them, but the configuration [0] options look fairly thorough so perhaps its worth checking those out? [0]: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/docs/Config.md https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/docs/Co...
  - tra3 5y ago
    At this point maybe it's worth investing in magit?..
- zorkso 5y ago
  Another vote for lazygit. Very smooth and I like that it shows you the commands it's running for the action you're doing. His other project, lazy docker, is also handy for dealing with collections of docker services.
PyWoody 5y ago
I'd recommend ncdu[1]. It's very fast, has vi-like bindings, and allows you to easily delete items right there. I use it frequently. [1] https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu/scr https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu/scr
- seanw444 5y ago
  It's helped me clear up a filled-to-the-brim disk, many a time.
rektide 5y ago
The amount of these that are scriptable, that are automateable, is sadly sadly sadly low. This feels like such a dangerous new cargo cult to me: ooh terminal good, hackers are here! Let's build applications for this! Ok, so... you may be in the console. But unless your program can be easily controlled & ran by other command line processes, unless it has machine-readable output, imo, you've simply imported the bad/ill/damaged/corrupt into a world that historically was usually much better. Building little isolated insular worlds is what apps do. On the terminal, I expect systems to compose & interoperate well. I have yet to see a TUI toolkit/library that demonstrates any form of commitment to first-principles of the shell world. That was my comment 26 days ago, seeing Bubbletea[1], a leading Go based library. This all feels so icky, so wronghearted to me. It could be done responsibly- yes- but it's not. This feels so wildly to be missing the point of the terminal, the shell: to be a complex, interwoven system, where anything- not just some basic pre-determined rote functionality- is possible. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391605
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Wouldn't it make the most sense to write a CLI application with an api, then a TUI wrapper that interfaces with it?
  - rektide 5y ago
    I think there's a lot of possible paths we could down from here. Your path sounds like a totally viable suggestion that would definitely work! It's never quite been as easy/convenient as it should be, but services which offer a non-console but other machine-to-machine interface could suffice. Which if any of these listed examples offer HTTP or DBus interfaces for control? (Not a lot, alas, but perhaps some?) If you do want to build an application, these are good ways to make it externally controllable. I'm not aware of any dbus nor http tooling that makes interfacing with these protocols super slick & easy & friendly from the command line, but there's at least ways to do both, and we probably ought refine our script-foo in both realms. Another thought is that the libraries/frameworks could help a lot. Ultimately frameworks like Bubbletea are ways to display stuff & script actions. Why don't we make those actions first class citizens and have the library natively expose actions in a command line format? I dont a lot of console apps do this, but a pattern I love is being able to feed a command sequence into a console program. This example is terrible, I need to think of something more purposeful, but for imagineering sake, perhaps: my-tui-music-player --enqueue album:40-oz-to-freedom --enqueue album:steal-your-face --randomize --play 10 --wait 20s --volume 0.8 --clear-playlist --enqueue never-gonna-give-you-up --play --wait 20s --pause
shric 5y ago
How about some libraries that help with building TUIs? I'll start with https://github.com/rivo/tview/ https://github.com/rivo/tview/ and https://github.com/gdamore/tcell https://github.com/gdamore/tcell
- JustinGarrison 5y ago
  Thanks! I just added them to the list
- mobiledev2014 5y ago
  Recently discussed here: https://charm.sh https://charm.sh Been dying to find the time to build something just for fun.
muwtyhg 5y ago
I like the low-power aspect of TUIs, but the problem I have with using them over GUI software is there is no launcher or start menu functionality for TUI (re)discovery. I'll often find a cool TUI posted here, install it "for later" and then proceed to forget I ever installed it. When "for later" finally comes around, I have to guess the name using tab completion or open my browser, search my history and hope it's there. Is there such a thing as a TUI launcher out there? Something that allows fuzzy search of program names, tags and a short description (using something akin to .desktop files for the application metadata). Then, when I suddenly need a program for a certain task, I don't have to hope I memorized the correct command. I just open my TUI launcher, type something related to my task and get a list of some TUIs that could help.
- pseudoramble 5y ago
  I'm not sure. It sounds like a genuinely neat idea for another TUI app though! Make the files .text too files instead and build and index of them for searching.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I'm in the habit of keeping a text file with all software I've installed and updating it immediately. Really helps remember stuff like this. Also I use dmenu and a script for using aliases in dmenu, and I create aliases for popping them out in new terminals. Really fast workflow. If you're using a lot of tui stuff changing workflow from double click to launch really makes the whole experience smoother, much smoother than GUI stuff.
  - RehnoLindeque 5y ago
    Since you're already keeping a text file, have you considered using nix (the package manager) to declare all your software packages? If you don't want a package cluttering up your system, but also don't want to forget about its existence you can just comment it out.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I really wish there was a note taking app like OneNote with a TUI. Text only of course. With automatic syncing. Of course you can make a bunch of text files but Easy categorisation, browsing, auto saving and even something as simple as window-size based word wrapping is difficult with most editors. Of course they're not really made for it. But I've never come across something like this.
- jmoss20 5y ago
  org mode?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tra3 5y ago
    org-mode + org-roam. It's really quite powerful. org-mode is bundled with emacs, but org-roam [1] you gotta install yourself. [1]: https://www.orgroam.com/ https://www.orgroam.com/
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      I was never a fan of Emacs but I have to admit most of that is just unfamiliarity. I'll give it a try thanks!
- AlanYx 5y ago
  Based on what you've said, you really should give org-mode a shot. (And org doesn't even have to be text only!) Given that word-wrapping is a priority for you, be sure to turn on org-indent mode and visual line mode. This gives you traditional outliner formatting with the indentation you'd traditionally expect (similar to how OneNote indents blocks) and proper word-wrapping. Although org has a huge ecosystem (org-roam is quite good), you don't need to go beyond plain org-mode if all you want is the features and general working model of OneNote. It's basically all there, batteries included.
cf141q5325 5y ago
Two TUIs for Hacker News are linked https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news
- ranger_danger 5y ago
  but unfortunately both of the ones I use are missing: https://github.com/ggerganov/hnterm https://github.com/ggerganov/hnterm https://github.com/wtheisen/TerminusBrowser https://github.com/wtheisen/TerminusBrowser
constantlm 5y ago
Second time I've seen this on HN, and it's also the second time I got excited thinking it has something to do with Tui, a pretty special species of bird we have in New Zealand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%AB%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%AB%C4%AB
ranger_danger 5y ago
I don't use github so I'll just leave these here: more HN clients: https://github.com/ggerganov/hnterm https://github.com/ggerganov/hnterm https://github.com/wtheisen/TerminusBrowser https://github.com/wtheisen/TerminusBrowser (also supports 4chan, reddit and others) RSS reader: https://github.com/qw3rtty/neix https://github.com/qw3rtty/neix window manager for the console: https://gitlab.com/AutumnMeowMeow/xtermwm https://gitlab.com/AutumnMeowMeow/xtermwm lots of other top replacements out there as well: bpytop, vtop, gtop, bottom, zenith, tiptop, nmon etc. and even more resources for this kind of stuff: https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/ https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/
suyash 5y ago
TUI actually stands for Tangible User Interface, suggest changing the acronym so as to not confuse and pollute it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangible_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangible_user_interface
- lugoues 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
- pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
  No, it actually doesn't.
- takeda 5y ago
  The TUI as Terminal User Interface predates it by a long time, and so far looks like Tangible User Interface is still just a gimmick.
alexb_ 5y ago
Gord is no longer maintained - is there an active alternative?
Timpy 5y ago
I recently discovered VisiData and I'm on a huge TUI kick right now because of it. I know GUIs have their advantages and I use them, but opening a file in vim or VisiData at light speed feels so good compared to firing up IntelliJ or some spreadsheet program. Good keybindings make working in the program a joy. These tools are often made by hackers/for hackers, not some corporate structure trying to pad their resume with whatever new feature looks good but works like shit that nobody asked for. When people developing the tool are also using the tool you get a good tool; this isn't exclusive to TUIs but it's common and it's one of the reasons that when they work they work so well. https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/
- jwiz 5y ago
  Finding visidata was like when I first learned about pivot tables, only better.
- moring 5y ago
  If IntelliJ was as fast as vim or VisiData, and as a bonus totally scriptable (I think it is to some extent, but just for fun let's assume you could change everything), which would you prefer then?
  - seanw444 5y ago
    Vim and Visidata. Emacs, actually. Open source rules all in my book.
    - eulgro 5y ago
      IntelliJ is open source.
      - seanw444 5y ago
        Sorry, wrong term. I meant FOSS. There is some software I can justify paying big bucks for (although the list is getting increasingly shorter thanks to better and better FOSS projects). But Emacs with zero licenses at all, and being the most customizable text editor on the planet? Vim, with the most innovative and speedy keybindings? What a steal. Don't get me wrong, JetBrains has some cool stuff. It's nice to see they're working on a lighter-weight text editor to add some competition to the newbie-friendly text editor market. And JetBrains Mono is a phenomenal monospace font.
YATA0 5y ago
And mainframers here? TUIs that are efficient and well designed have existed on the mainframe probably longer than most HN readers have been alive.
decafb 5y ago
I’m all for TUIs but for me anything that calls itself terminal oriented needs to work at 80ish character line length. It seems that many of the entries (especially the dashboards) need much longer lines to be useful - then sorry this should be a GUI.
throwaway180118 5y ago
Nice list. I was hoping to find a cups printer manager TUI. Something other than the web interface that I could SSH into and view print jobs, queues, and printers. Unfortunately there's nothing like that on the list. Any recommendations, HN folks?
- tiben_ 5y ago
  Cups has its own set of cli tools, see <https://www.cups.org/doc/admin.html https://www.cups.org/doc/admin.html>, and supports "lp" and "lpr" commands, see <https://www.cups.org/doc/options.html https://www.cups.org/doc/options.html>. But theses are not TUI though.
- pacifika 5y ago
  yast
pjmlp 5y ago
Missing Turbo Vision for MS-DOS, one of the best ones, produced by Borland for Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++. Nowadays still available (in spirit) in Free Pascal and a C++ port. https://wiki.freepascal.org/Free_Vision https://wiki.freepascal.org/Free_Vision https://github.com/magiblot/tvision https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
- andrea76 5y ago
  the last one is in the list
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Somehow I missed it, thanks for the correction.
e19293001 5y ago
How about playing tetris inside emacs? Well, there's a lot of games inside emacs https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/tree/master/lisp/play https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/tree/master/lisp/play
- teddyh 5y ago
  Descriptions: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Amusements.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Am...
- dotancohen 5y ago
  > Well, there's a lot of games inside emacs There's a text editor [1] available too. [1] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil
andrea76 5y ago
Is there any TUI library for web development? I would like to make a webpage with TUI interface.
- wernsey 5y ago
  You can look at BOOTSTRA.386 https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386 https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386
wiz21c 5y ago
Ask HN: I love TUI too but usually they're designed to run inside a console. Is there a "console" I can embed in my own application so that my program doesn't need a terminal to be run ? Of course I could use a simple GUI text widget with fixed size font, but I doubt it'd be fast... Maybe notcurses ?
3np 5y ago
For anyone who wants to add graphics to their TUI, notcurses is pushing the boundaries of what's possible and viable in a terminal. Still could use some bindings for higher-level languages and ergonomics. It also degrades pretty gracefully depending on terminal capabilities. Check out notcurses-demo and see what you can pull off in a terminal. My only gripe is that tmux degrades significantly. Regardless, dankamongmen is an awesome dude bringing back the demoscene vibes. https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses
asah 5y ago
LOL OP forgot emacs
sandreas 5y ago
Here are my personal favourite command line libs for .NET: - Argument parser - https://github.com/tyrrrz/CliFx https://github.com/tyrrrz/CliFx - TUI builder: https://spectreconsole.net/ https://spectreconsole.net/ and https://github.com/spectreconsole/spectre.console https://github.com/spectreconsole/spectre.console
- password4321 5y ago
  Nice! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732274#30732565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732274#30732565 > I was looking for a C# version [of Turbo Vision] mentioned: https://github.com/elw00d/consoleframework https://github.com/elw00d/consoleframework + https://github.com/jinek/Consolonia https://github.com/jinek/Consolonia
ho_schi 5y ago
I love TUIs. They are usually clearly structured and fast. They require creators and users to focus on workflow :) While these are experience values and not strict rules: Astonishingly older users are performing better with TUIs than GUIs, and the worst are usually websites and web-applications. By "better" I mean fast in usage and less prone to mistakes. The only stuff which is worse than websites are probably voice-assistants, people just avoid them. And voice assistants could be better with local evaluation and open speech database, especially for persons with limited eye-sight.
- brimble 5y ago
  > While these are experience values and not strict rules: Astonishingly older users are performing better with TUIs than GUIs, and the worst are usually websites and web-applications. By "better" I mean fast in usage and less prone to mistakes. The #1 thing that messes my (elderly) parents up, using a UI, is inconsistency. In modern software, this comes in two main forms: frequent updates that modify the UI, and screen-takeover notices (often about updates that have modified the UI, or to beg the user to perform an update that will modify the UI). These are much rarer in TUIs.
tambourine_man 5y ago
No love for midnight commander?
- tra3 5y ago
  What do you mean? <3 mc! - Turn on "lynx like navigation" in "Panel options". Allows you to move around real quick when you're traversing a bunch of directories. - SFTP/FTP mode, where you can mount a remote FS like it was local (in case you need to selectively copy files).
Decabytes 5y ago
What exactly is it about TUIs that make them better for somethings than GUIs? Is it just that they are simpler to use and less bloated? Would calling the direct windowing apis in each operating system be better than going through a library like GTK or QT? Is the solution better TUIs or better GUIs?
- btschaegg 5y ago
  I think a big part of it, at least for advanced users, isn't only the individual tool itself, but the terminal ecosystem: Vim, for example, excels at quick nimble edits for someone who darts around the filesystem in their terminal. Even if you have to pop back into your shell for a command or two while editing, you have the option of C-z and `fg`. The same thing applies to many TUI tools as well. Many of them deliver things you could get with more primitive tools, as well (say `btop` and `htop` vs `ps`), but have a nicer feedback loop while still allowing for pop-in-and-pop-out interactions. GUI alternatives would have you pushing the mouse around a lot without much benefit. That, and they work well through SSH, without the hassle of setting up X11 forwarding. For other TUI tools that are typically used in longer sessions (e.g. `gdb`), that is also a huge benefit. Most likely you won't even realize how huge until you have tried to set up a non-TUI alternative for the same scenario (the remote debugging service for Visual Studio is a nightmare to set up, for example).
  - pickledcods 5y ago
    Absolutely this. Minimal setup debugging using gdb in TUI/sourcecode mode, optionally over ssh.
- tiborsaas 5y ago
  It's like voxel based games VS AAA titles. Everyone is forced to used the same set of building blocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character And since there are obvious limitations, developers must focus on core functionality rather than getting paddings and margins right and be more creative in the process.
- cbm-vic-20 5y ago
ringworld 5y ago
A little late to the article, if anyone is still reading comments I recommend cmus, a console music player with extensive key bindings and library support. https://cmus.github.io/ https://cmus.github.io/

557 points by andrewstuart 5y ago

My personal favorite: https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed

I know that people love their TUIs, especially people working on tiling WM in Linux, I understand them, but I still think that the best TUIs of all time were the products developed by Borland for DOS. The Turbo Vision libraries and the apps built with them are still the gold standard in my heart.

rahen 5y ago
Indeed, I have fond memories of the Turbo C IDE. I wish conio.h would have been something under Unix, free from the VT100 cruft. ncurses is lacking and awkward to use. Apparently conio.h was ported to Linux (https://github.com/nowres/conio-for-linux https://github.com/nowres/conio-for-linux) but I don't think it ever was a popular option.
password4321 5y ago
Modern Turbo Vision 2.0 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732274
badsectoracula 5y ago
FWIW Free Vision is basically an improved Turbo Vision for Free Pascal, it recently (as in, last month) even got unicode support[0]. Though it is a bit weird in that it uses the TP5.5-style objects which aren't as powerful as the Delphi-style objects (very roughly think class in C++ vs class in Java). The (sadly only German) tutorial linked by the wiki has a bunch of screenshots in a terminal. [0] https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Free_Vision#Unicode_version https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Free_Vision#Unicode_vers...

pech0rin 5y ago

I wonder for the reason of all these list repos in the past few years. It would awesome if there was a better way to search repos. Maybe semantically in a way that you had a problem to solve and it would suggest open source projects. I think its cool to see lists of projects but I dont find it super helpful, am I supposed to bookmark 20 repos which each list another 1000 repos? There has to be a better way for discoverability.

kevinsundar 5y ago
It goes deeper haha https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
armchairhacker 5y ago
Wiki pages. A repo containing README.md is a primitive wiki page. And with GitHub you can contribute (pull requests) or discuss meta (issues). But a page on Wikipedia or something like it be better. But, it's harder to create such a wiki then a GitHub repo (which most devs are already familiar with). And it might not show up as high on SEO. So GitHub repo it is.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
Github still has atom feeds for repos, for example: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis/commits/master.atom https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis/commits/master.atom Unfortunately they don't really make links to these feeds very visible in the UI anymore. But toss that in your feed reader of choice and you'll get an update when the awesome list content changes.
octoberfranklin 5y ago
> It would awesome if there was a better way to search repos. Not having that is kinda the whole value proposition of Big Data. Github gives you free bandwidth and disk space. In return they get to "grep like a boss" running complex queries with no fuzziness; you don't. Similar story with search engines and their crawler output. And Amazon's product catalog. None of these let you turn off the fuzziness and run large/frequent/complex queries, even if you're willing to pay for it. Amazon's "good" product search API is ratelimited by how many convertible leads you send them. I dunno, it's kinda lame, but I guess that's how things work.

pcr910303 5y ago

CLIs (that read input from stdin and spit out results to stdout/stderr) are useful in an automation/data processing pipeline. But TUIs are a gimmick that should have been just GUIs. (And text selection is not a reason to resort to TUIs — it’s a reason to improve GUIs.) Unfortunately native GUI programming doesn’t have the coolness/geekiness factor of TUI apps… Edit: Looks like I should clarify – I'm not saying that people should stop creating TUIs right now: in the current landscape, TUIs do have advantages like being usable over ssh, text selection, a simpler programming model in most languages... but I'm arguing that these advantages aren't inherent to TUIs. We should aim to improve GUIs, not stuck in a interface from the 70s. Unfortunately I've seen too many people (including a big chunk of HN) that argue that TUIs are just inherently superior.

Arnavion 5y ago
I can make a TUI by just reading from stdin, writing to stdout, and some minimal parsing and emitting of VT codes that have mostly not changed in a few decades. To make a GUI I have to pull in megabytes of libraries, learn their API, then update them every time they release a new version that will likely have breaking changes. They'll also have questionable bindings outside of one or two "first-class" languages, so reading docs and investigating why something isn't working is harder. I'll stick with TUIs, thanks.
- hahajk 5y ago
  Web interfaces are the GUI equivalent of the simple, timeless tty interface. My 10 year old router still renders html just fine on modern Chrome.
  - Arnavion 5y ago
    Yes, but at the cost of needing to run a browser. In this modern era of everyone fetishizing single-instance applications, a browser crash caused by one tab would mean I lose not only all my open websites but also all these "apps". I have to `pkill -9` firefox once every few days because of bugs; a few months ago it used to break the clipboard until it was restarted, these days it freezes when dragging tabs around in the tab bar, tomorrow I'm sure it'll be some new bug... I'm glad I don't lose my editor / IDE / chat clients / monitoring dashboards when this happens.

nodesocket 5y ago

One of the most useful for me is McFly[1] which is not listed. McFly provides a nice U/I on top of history search. Works with both bash and zsh shells. You can remove entries from your history as well all within the McFly U/I. Game changer. [1] https://github.com/cantino/mcfly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly

armchairhacker 5y ago

TUIs are very pretty and very convenient. Unfortunately rendering to the Terminal is...slow. See https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh. Honestly I wonder if there is a way to speed it up. Like a new terminal mode which lets you write or color a particular row/column directly, or utilizes the GPU to render to each pixel, or really anything better than literally printing text with fancy spacing, escapes, etc. on each refresh. Until then, anything which is render-intensive you're much better using a GUI, even if it's just a shell script which opens a window while it's running.

theamk 5y ago
As long as you don't send video/graphics, most of the terminals are limited by the link bandwidth, as opposed to rendering performance. And if you are sending video or animated graphics, then perhaps a special video-orented protocol is a much better choice. Like that browsh project - I am fairly sure the performance would be much better with special protocol.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
Perfectly emulating pixel graphics with a TUI isn't really the point. The point is to simplify an interface to the most essential text. Look at lynx or elinks for an example of a more realistic and usable TUI web browser. It doesn't try to play youtube videos, it just extracts the text and content from a site to display it. But to your question, yes there are 'text' console bitmap graphics protocols. Check out sixel for one example: https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ Some terminal emulators support other bitmap graphics too.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  The point of things like sixel is to efficiently support interfaces where text is mixed with a little bit of graphics, like in many old-style apps of the 1980s and 1990s - they work very well for that. Replicating a full-featured GUI though is kinda outside their scope; you could make it work but it's not really the point.

dboreham 5y ago

Grumble. TUI means Telephony User Interface.

eek2121 5y ago

Steam TUI! I always wanted to make something like that. Glad to know I don't need to.

miguelmurca 5y ago

Surprised scli isn't in there. It's one of the few pieces of software that I'll actually advocate for: super stable, great bindings if you're coming from vim, and surprisingly complete. Also since the desktop app for Signal is hot garbage, it's really a must for me. [1] https://github.com/isamert/scli/ https://github.com/isamert/scli/

miguelmurca 5y ago
Also sup-mail, which I found much more usable than mutt, neomutt, or alpine.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  If you like sup-mail, I recommend also trying notmuch via alot. https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/ https://github.com/pazz/alot https://github.com/pazz/alot There are other options if you don't like alot. See: https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/
betwixthewires 5y ago
You're a godsend. I've been trying to hack together a tiling desktop and trying to focus on CLI and tui options, the Frankenstein of graphical and tui applications is not quite what I'd prefer. And the signal electron app is 100% hot garbage, I wont use it regardless anymore. Gonna check this out.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Another option would be to bridge signal to Matrix (along with other networks as I do) and then use gomuks. It's pretty neat for TUI and can even show low Res images.I have WhatsApp, telegram and signal bridged. There's a really great ansible playbook that'll set it all up for you. I do this because this way I can have all my chat apps in one app and also all the chart histories together in one database. But scli is pretty nice too yeah.
  - 5y ago

layer8 5y ago

Any opinions on lazygit vs. tig vs. gitui?

dpatterbee 5y ago
I'm a big fan of lazygit. I would describe myself as highly competent in using the git cli, but lazygit just makes most common operations so much faster that I'd hate to go back to only using the cli.
- rplnt 5y ago
  Same here. I still combine both, but over time used lazygit more and more. I still only use a few features: view diffs, staging and resetting files, commit and push. One disclaimer though: I'm using version 0.14. Starting with 0.17 or so the UI got a bit too noisy (loads of colors), but most importantly the tool got extremely slow. Like the startup time jumped from not noticeable at all to several seconds, which is absolutely unusable for what I need the tool for. Since it was a real pain to downgrade I haven't tried newer versions since. Maybe it's fixed, I don't know and I have no desire to find out.
  - dpatterbee 5y ago
    Interesting, I haven't noticed any performance issues, and I'm currently running version 0.31.4. Perhaps the issues you're talking about were fixed. Regarding the colours, I personally like them, but the configuration [0] options look fairly thorough so perhaps its worth checking those out? [0]: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/docs/Config.md https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/docs/Co...
- tra3 5y ago
  At this point maybe it's worth investing in magit?..
zorkso 5y ago
Another vote for lazygit. Very smooth and I like that it shows you the commands it's running for the action you're doing. His other project, lazy docker, is also handy for dealing with collections of docker services.

PyWoody 5y ago

I'd recommend ncdu[1]. It's very fast, has vi-like bindings, and allows you to easily delete items right there. I use it frequently. [1] https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu/scr https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu/scr

seanw444 5y ago
It's helped me clear up a filled-to-the-brim disk, many a time.

rektide 5y ago

The amount of these that are scriptable, that are automateable, is sadly sadly sadly low. This feels like such a dangerous new cargo cult to me: ooh terminal good, hackers are here! Let's build applications for this! Ok, so... you may be in the console. But unless your program can be easily controlled & ran by other command line processes, unless it has machine-readable output, imo, you've simply imported the bad/ill/damaged/corrupt into a world that historically was usually much better. Building little isolated insular worlds is what apps do. On the terminal, I expect systems to compose & interoperate well. I have yet to see a TUI toolkit/library that demonstrates any form of commitment to first-principles of the shell world. That was my comment 26 days ago, seeing Bubbletea[1], a leading Go based library. This all feels so icky, so wronghearted to me. It could be done responsibly- yes- but it's not. This feels so wildly to be missing the point of the terminal, the shell: to be a complex, interwoven system, where anything- not just some basic pre-determined rote functionality- is possible. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30391605

betwixthewires 5y ago
Wouldn't it make the most sense to write a CLI application with an api, then a TUI wrapper that interfaces with it?
- rektide 5y ago
  I think there's a lot of possible paths we could down from here. Your path sounds like a totally viable suggestion that would definitely work! It's never quite been as easy/convenient as it should be, but services which offer a non-console but other machine-to-machine interface could suffice. Which if any of these listed examples offer HTTP or DBus interfaces for control? (Not a lot, alas, but perhaps some?) If you do want to build an application, these are good ways to make it externally controllable. I'm not aware of any dbus nor http tooling that makes interfacing with these protocols super slick & easy & friendly from the command line, but there's at least ways to do both, and we probably ought refine our script-foo in both realms. Another thought is that the libraries/frameworks could help a lot. Ultimately frameworks like Bubbletea are ways to display stuff & script actions. Why don't we make those actions first class citizens and have the library natively expose actions in a command line format? I dont a lot of console apps do this, but a pattern I love is being able to feed a command sequence into a console program. This example is terrible, I need to think of something more purposeful, but for imagineering sake, perhaps: my-tui-music-player --enqueue album:40-oz-to-freedom --enqueue album:steal-your-face --randomize --play 10 --wait 20s --volume 0.8 --clear-playlist --enqueue never-gonna-give-you-up --play --wait 20s --pause

shric 5y ago

How about some libraries that help with building TUIs? I'll start with https://github.com/rivo/tview/ https://github.com/rivo/tview/ and https://github.com/gdamore/tcell https://github.com/gdamore/tcell

JustinGarrison 5y ago
Thanks! I just added them to the list
mobiledev2014 5y ago
Recently discussed here: https://charm.sh https://charm.sh Been dying to find the time to build something just for fun.

muwtyhg 5y ago

I like the low-power aspect of TUIs, but the problem I have with using them over GUI software is there is no launcher or start menu functionality for TUI (re)discovery. I'll often find a cool TUI posted here, install it "for later" and then proceed to forget I ever installed it. When "for later" finally comes around, I have to guess the name using tab completion or open my browser, search my history and hope it's there. Is there such a thing as a TUI launcher out there? Something that allows fuzzy search of program names, tags and a short description (using something akin to .desktop files for the application metadata). Then, when I suddenly need a program for a certain task, I don't have to hope I memorized the correct command. I just open my TUI launcher, type something related to my task and get a list of some TUIs that could help.

pseudoramble 5y ago
I'm not sure. It sounds like a genuinely neat idea for another TUI app though! Make the files .text too files instead and build and index of them for searching.
betwixthewires 5y ago
I'm in the habit of keeping a text file with all software I've installed and updating it immediately. Really helps remember stuff like this. Also I use dmenu and a script for using aliases in dmenu, and I create aliases for popping them out in new terminals. Really fast workflow. If you're using a lot of tui stuff changing workflow from double click to launch really makes the whole experience smoother, much smoother than GUI stuff.
- RehnoLindeque 5y ago
  Since you're already keeping a text file, have you considered using nix (the package manager) to declare all your software packages? If you don't want a package cluttering up your system, but also don't want to forget about its existence you can just comment it out.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I really wish there was a note taking app like OneNote with a TUI. Text only of course. With automatic syncing. Of course you can make a bunch of text files but Easy categorisation, browsing, auto saving and even something as simple as window-size based word wrapping is difficult with most editors. Of course they're not really made for it. But I've never come across something like this.

jmoss20 5y ago
org mode?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tra3 5y ago
  org-mode + org-roam. It's really quite powerful. org-mode is bundled with emacs, but org-roam [1] you gotta install yourself. [1]: https://www.orgroam.com/ https://www.orgroam.com/
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    I was never a fan of Emacs but I have to admit most of that is just unfamiliarity. I'll give it a try thanks!
AlanYx 5y ago
Based on what you've said, you really should give org-mode a shot. (And org doesn't even have to be text only!) Given that word-wrapping is a priority for you, be sure to turn on org-indent mode and visual line mode. This gives you traditional outliner formatting with the indentation you'd traditionally expect (similar to how OneNote indents blocks) and proper word-wrapping. Although org has a huge ecosystem (org-roam is quite good), you don't need to go beyond plain org-mode if all you want is the features and general working model of OneNote. It's basically all there, batteries included.

cf141q5325 5y ago

Two TUIs for Hacker News are linked https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news

ranger_danger 5y ago
but unfortunately both of the ones I use are missing: https://github.com/ggerganov/hnterm https://github.com/ggerganov/hnterm https://github.com/wtheisen/TerminusBrowser https://github.com/wtheisen/TerminusBrowser

constantlm 5y ago

Second time I've seen this on HN, and it's also the second time I got excited thinking it has something to do with Tui, a pretty special species of bird we have in New Zealand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%AB%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%AB%C4%AB

ranger_danger 5y ago

I don't use github so I'll just leave these here: more HN clients: https://github.com/ggerganov/hnterm https://github.com/ggerganov/hnterm https://github.com/wtheisen/TerminusBrowser https://github.com/wtheisen/TerminusBrowser (also supports 4chan, reddit and others) RSS reader: https://github.com/qw3rtty/neix https://github.com/qw3rtty/neix window manager for the console: https://gitlab.com/AutumnMeowMeow/xtermwm https://gitlab.com/AutumnMeowMeow/xtermwm lots of other top replacements out there as well: bpytop, vtop, gtop, bottom, zenith, tiptop, nmon etc. and even more resources for this kind of stuff: https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/ https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/

suyash 5y ago

TUI actually stands for Tangible User Interface, suggest changing the acronym so as to not confuse and pollute it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangible_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangible_user_interface

lugoues 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
No, it actually doesn't.
takeda 5y ago
The TUI as Terminal User Interface predates it by a long time, and so far looks like Tangible User Interface is still just a gimmick.

alexb_ 5y ago

Gord is no longer maintained - is there an active alternative?

Timpy 5y ago

I recently discovered VisiData and I'm on a huge TUI kick right now because of it. I know GUIs have their advantages and I use them, but opening a file in vim or VisiData at light speed feels so good compared to firing up IntelliJ or some spreadsheet program. Good keybindings make working in the program a joy. These tools are often made by hackers/for hackers, not some corporate structure trying to pad their resume with whatever new feature looks good but works like shit that nobody asked for. When people developing the tool are also using the tool you get a good tool; this isn't exclusive to TUIs but it's common and it's one of the reasons that when they work they work so well. https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/

jwiz 5y ago
Finding visidata was like when I first learned about pivot tables, only better.
moring 5y ago
If IntelliJ was as fast as vim or VisiData, and as a bonus totally scriptable (I think it is to some extent, but just for fun let's assume you could change everything), which would you prefer then?
- seanw444 5y ago
  Vim and Visidata. Emacs, actually. Open source rules all in my book.
  - eulgro 5y ago
    IntelliJ is open source.
    - seanw444 5y ago
      Sorry, wrong term. I meant FOSS. There is some software I can justify paying big bucks for (although the list is getting increasingly shorter thanks to better and better FOSS projects). But Emacs with zero licenses at all, and being the most customizable text editor on the planet? Vim, with the most innovative and speedy keybindings? What a steal. Don't get me wrong, JetBrains has some cool stuff. It's nice to see they're working on a lighter-weight text editor to add some competition to the newbie-friendly text editor market. And JetBrains Mono is a phenomenal monospace font.

YATA0 5y ago

And mainframers here? TUIs that are efficient and well designed have existed on the mainframe probably longer than most HN readers have been alive.

decafb 5y ago

I’m all for TUIs but for me anything that calls itself terminal oriented needs to work at 80ish character line length. It seems that many of the entries (especially the dashboards) need much longer lines to be useful - then sorry this should be a GUI.

throwaway180118 5y ago

Nice list. I was hoping to find a cups printer manager TUI. Something other than the web interface that I could SSH into and view print jobs, queues, and printers. Unfortunately there's nothing like that on the list. Any recommendations, HN folks?

tiben_ 5y ago
Cups has its own set of cli tools, see <https://www.cups.org/doc/admin.html https://www.cups.org/doc/admin.html>, and supports "lp" and "lpr" commands, see <https://www.cups.org/doc/options.html https://www.cups.org/doc/options.html>. But theses are not TUI though.
pacifika 5y ago
yast

pjmlp 5y ago

Missing Turbo Vision for MS-DOS, one of the best ones, produced by Borland for Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++. Nowadays still available (in spirit) in Free Pascal and a C++ port. https://wiki.freepascal.org/Free_Vision https://wiki.freepascal.org/Free_Vision https://github.com/magiblot/tvision https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

andrea76 5y ago
the last one is in the list
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Somehow I missed it, thanks for the correction.

e19293001 5y ago

How about playing tetris inside emacs? Well, there's a lot of games inside emacs https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/tree/master/lisp/play https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/tree/master/lisp/play

teddyh 5y ago
Descriptions: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Amusements.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Am...
dotancohen 5y ago
> Well, there's a lot of games inside emacs There's a text editor [1] available too. [1] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

andrea76 5y ago

Is there any TUI library for web development? I would like to make a webpage with TUI interface.

wernsey 5y ago
You can look at BOOTSTRA.386 https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386 https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386

wiz21c 5y ago

Ask HN: I love TUI too but usually they're designed to run inside a console. Is there a "console" I can embed in my own application so that my program doesn't need a terminal to be run ? Of course I could use a simple GUI text widget with fixed size font, but I doubt it'd be fast... Maybe notcurses ?

3np 5y ago

For anyone who wants to add graphics to their TUI, notcurses is pushing the boundaries of what's possible and viable in a terminal. Still could use some bindings for higher-level languages and ergonomics. It also degrades pretty gracefully depending on terminal capabilities. Check out notcurses-demo and see what you can pull off in a terminal. My only gripe is that tmux degrades significantly. Regardless, dankamongmen is an awesome dude bringing back the demoscene vibes. https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

asah 5y ago

LOL OP forgot emacs

sandreas 5y ago

Here are my personal favourite command line libs for .NET: - Argument parser - https://github.com/tyrrrz/CliFx https://github.com/tyrrrz/CliFx - TUI builder: https://spectreconsole.net/ https://spectreconsole.net/ and https://github.com/spectreconsole/spectre.console https://github.com/spectreconsole/spectre.console

password4321 5y ago
Nice! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732274#30732565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732274#30732565 > I was looking for a C# version [of Turbo Vision] mentioned: https://github.com/elw00d/consoleframework https://github.com/elw00d/consoleframework + https://github.com/jinek/Consolonia https://github.com/jinek/Consolonia

ho_schi 5y ago

I love TUIs. They are usually clearly structured and fast. They require creators and users to focus on workflow :) While these are experience values and not strict rules: Astonishingly older users are performing better with TUIs than GUIs, and the worst are usually websites and web-applications. By "better" I mean fast in usage and less prone to mistakes. The only stuff which is worse than websites are probably voice-assistants, people just avoid them. And voice assistants could be better with local evaluation and open speech database, especially for persons with limited eye-sight.

brimble 5y ago
> While these are experience values and not strict rules: Astonishingly older users are performing better with TUIs than GUIs, and the worst are usually websites and web-applications. By "better" I mean fast in usage and less prone to mistakes. The #1 thing that messes my (elderly) parents up, using a UI, is inconsistency. In modern software, this comes in two main forms: frequent updates that modify the UI, and screen-takeover notices (often about updates that have modified the UI, or to beg the user to perform an update that will modify the UI). These are much rarer in TUIs.

tambourine_man 5y ago

No love for midnight commander?

tra3 5y ago
What do you mean? <3 mc! - Turn on "lynx like navigation" in "Panel options". Allows you to move around real quick when you're traversing a bunch of directories. - SFTP/FTP mode, where you can mount a remote FS like it was local (in case you need to selectively copy files).

Decabytes 5y ago

What exactly is it about TUIs that make them better for somethings than GUIs? Is it just that they are simpler to use and less bloated? Would calling the direct windowing apis in each operating system be better than going through a library like GTK or QT? Is the solution better TUIs or better GUIs?

btschaegg 5y ago
I think a big part of it, at least for advanced users, isn't only the individual tool itself, but the terminal ecosystem: Vim, for example, excels at quick nimble edits for someone who darts around the filesystem in their terminal. Even if you have to pop back into your shell for a command or two while editing, you have the option of C-z and `fg`. The same thing applies to many TUI tools as well. Many of them deliver things you could get with more primitive tools, as well (say `btop` and `htop` vs `ps`), but have a nicer feedback loop while still allowing for pop-in-and-pop-out interactions. GUI alternatives would have you pushing the mouse around a lot without much benefit. That, and they work well through SSH, without the hassle of setting up X11 forwarding. For other TUI tools that are typically used in longer sessions (e.g. `gdb`), that is also a huge benefit. Most likely you won't even realize how huge until you have tried to set up a non-TUI alternative for the same scenario (the remote debugging service for Visual Studio is a nightmare to set up, for example).
- pickledcods 5y ago
  Absolutely this. Minimal setup debugging using gdb in TUI/sourcecode mode, optionally over ssh.
tiborsaas 5y ago
It's like voxel based games VS AAA titles. Everyone is forced to used the same set of building blocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character And since there are obvious limitations, developers must focus on core functionality rather than getting paddings and margins right and be more creative in the process.
cbm-vic-20 5y ago

ringworld 5y ago

A little late to the article, if anyone is still reading comments I recommend cmus, a console music player with extensive key bindings and library support. https://cmus.github.io/ https://cmus.github.io/