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First glance is impressive. I’ve spent a lot of time in ncurses for a security appliance we make, so I have to ask: how does Textualize compare to ncurses in te

First glance is impressive. I’ve spent a lot of time in ncurses for a security appliance we make, so I have to ask: how does Textualize compare to ncurses in terms of a) richness and b) complexity? We create some fairly complex and feature rich forms for managing transfers in this appliance, but ncurses isn’t always the friendliest beast - we’ve managed to make it simpler to use with a lot (a lot!) of component-like functions to get to the level of abstraction we need, but one wonders about the grass over yonder fence.

pengaru 4y ago
I'm surprised to hear someone is developing current ncurses applications today in a commercial context. At a former "disaster recovery" startup I had written a little ncurses tool for handling data transfers from pools of external USB drives customers would ship us to seed their off-site backups. This was something like 8 years ago now, and it was already a situation where literally nobody else in the company, new or existing hires, wanted anything to do with maintaining what was really a small ~1000-line C+ncurses application. I was on the systems/platform/backend/OS team and it was just a weekend hack to get us going with something ops could interface with via putty. I can't imagine how much more difficult it is to find anyone with ncurses familiarity today, and few people seem interested in wasting time learning such antiquated tech. In hindsight I feel like I never should have written that tool in the first place, instead letting one of the front-end devs just make a REST API and web doodad for the whole thing. At least then it would have been familiar territory for practically every engineer they hired.
- PeterWhittaker 4y ago
  Funny thing about writing security products: one tends to work with a lot of things most people don’t want to touch (SELinux and SecComp come to mind; yeah, they are part of my job). As I noted in another comment, using a TUI starts us off with a smaller attack surface and fewer dependencies, which makes it easier to scrub things down even further with relative ease (relative). It may make tooling and programming tougher, but it simplifies the overall job of achieving a target level of security.
nisegami 4y ago
I tried creating a Textual app recently and found it lacking in functionality. However, I have been following the "css branch" development and think it touches on basically all of my pain points. So I think it's worth a look once that drops next week.

pengaru 4y ago

I'm surprised to hear someone is developing current ncurses applications today in a commercial context. At a former "disaster recovery" startup I had written a little ncurses tool for handling data transfers from pools of external USB drives customers would ship us to seed their off-site backups. This was something like 8 years ago now, and it was already a situation where literally nobody else in the company, new or existing hires, wanted anything to do with maintaining what was really a small ~1000-line C+ncurses application. I was on the systems/platform/backend/OS team and it was just a weekend hack to get us going with something ops could interface with via putty. I can't imagine how much more difficult it is to find anyone with ncurses familiarity today, and few people seem interested in wasting time learning such antiquated tech. In hindsight I feel like I never should have written that tool in the first place, instead letting one of the front-end devs just make a REST API and web doodad for the whole thing. At least then it would have been familiar territory for practically every engineer they hired.

PeterWhittaker 4y ago
Funny thing about writing security products: one tends to work with a lot of things most people don’t want to touch (SELinux and SecComp come to mind; yeah, they are part of my job). As I noted in another comment, using a TUI starts us off with a smaller attack surface and fewer dependencies, which makes it easier to scrub things down even further with relative ease (relative). It may make tooling and programming tougher, but it simplifies the overall job of achieving a target level of security.

nisegami 4y ago

I tried creating a Textual app recently and found it lacking in functionality. However, I have been following the "css branch" development and think it touches on basically all of my pain points. So I think it's worth a look once that drops next week.