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> I don't understand why the command line is "not meant for fancy user interfaces" "command line" is a different term from a "terminal", but the reason why it'
by qweqwe14 3y ago
> I don't understand why the command line is "not meant for fancy user interfaces"
"command line" is a different term from a "terminal", but the reason why it's not great for graphical UIs is that character cells are a bad abstraction for it, people just keep adding more and more features/extensions to terminals to compensate for it, which isn't a good direction at all
- vidarh 3y agoPlenty of fancy user interfaces do not need to be graphical, but can still benefit from better textual presentation. As for "features", there are very few features in modern terminals that affect display that weren't either present in "actual" terminal hardware several decades ago or are spiritual successors to that. E.g. displaying images in terminals has been a thing since at least 1981, yet a whole lot of terminals haven't supported it until it started getting a bit of a resurgence lately. I don't agree it's not a good direction - GUI's are way too complex for a whole lot of applications, where terminals allow you to output quite advanced things with a handful of lines of code and no external dependencies. If there was a push to make GUI protocols simpler (instead of far more work, as with Wayland) for trivial programs to output, I might be more open to this view.