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Love all the terminal tooling that's come out in recent years. I'm this close to chrome and rofi being the only gui I'm using on my work machine. This looks gre

Love all the terminal tooling that's come out in recent years. I'm this close to chrome and rofi being the only gui I'm using on my work machine. This looks great!

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
[flagged]
- hiatus 2y ago
  This program is available for multiple platforms, not just linux. Anyway, many people prefer keyboard navigation and already have a shell open for other tasks. Navigation by keyboard alone is not generally a feature in most GUI applications (see things like Vimium to add that capability to Chrome, for instance).
  - Teever 2y ago
    Not only is it multiplatform, but through the magic of SSH TUIs are available on any platform. I think that a lot of people are drawn to the idea of being able to customize their UI the exact way they want it and have it be that way everywhere. There are compromises with TUIs but that idea of a universal interface is very alluring to some people who want to optimize that part of their life.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  That's too much generalization. I like skeuomorphic GUI with proper shadows, separators, color gradients, 2.5D borders, menus, etc. Nobody is offering those these days, so I gravitated towards TUI; I also have a lot of nostalgia for the DOS days, and although terminal emulation is worse than a proper command line, I make do.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    I came on macOS on Mojave, but have seen Maverick and Lion screenshots and I've used iOS 6 as well. Flat UI can be prettier, but the physicality of skeuomorphic design is better for interaction. There was something more when interacting with Winamp instead of the current batch of audio players we have today. Win7 was great.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Keyboards are often faster than mice.
  - eviks 2y ago
    GUIs recognize keyboard as a valid input option
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      They can but not always. For TUIs, it's mandatory.
      - eviks 2y ago
        Shortcuts, the things that actually make keyboard faster, aren't mandatory in a TUI
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        They're not mandatory, and indeed, less likely, in GUIs anyway, so I'm not sure the point you're arguing is with you.
        eviks 2y ago
        The point I'm arguing with is your made up benefit of TUIs re. keybinds
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        TUIs, in general, are more amenable to keyboard navigation than GUIs are; id est, even if GUIs offer keyboard navigation, they are simply not, on average, as good as those of TUIs. I'm not sure how that is controversial in the slightest.
        eviks 2y ago
- schindlabua 2y ago
  It's a slippery slope, once you've spent a year tailoring your setup it removes so much friction from those tasks you do 100 times a day. Sometimes I look at my macos coworkers and they have a single application on fullscreen and then they shake their mouse or whatever and 20 windows fly over the screen and then they scan them all to find the other window they are looking for, and I really wonder how they get work done. I use i3 and have 5 credit-card sized terminals open at any given time without taking up much screen real estate, and it's so great. Takes some getting used to though.
  - something98 2y ago
    > Sometimes I look at my macos coworkers ... and I really wonder how they get work done And I read the sentence before and wonder the same: > once you've spent a year tailoring your setup
    - schindlabua 2y ago
      The irony is not lost on me but you can get productive if you spend a weekend configuring stuff and then you upgrade as you go :)
    - sophacles 2y ago
      In both cases during the "learn the tool" phase you end up spending time having to figure out how to do things, understand workflows etc. In the TUI case though, you can usually tweak that workflow and configure it to match your brand of thinking. It costs a little more per instance up front, but after that year (or whatever time period), you get a much less frustrating experience, and the oddball things your particular workflow requires have been smoothed out - where in the GUI you'd still be frustrated and a bit fumbly or suboptimal, so you continue to pay the penalty for it over time. It's really about how you amortize the total time put into using the tool.
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
    >… macos coworkers and they have a single application on fullscreen… They are probably recent ex-Windows users struggling to understand a superficially similar but profoundly different WIMP paradigm. >… then they shake their mouse or whatever and 20 windows fly over the screen The fact that they can’t handle Mission Control is another tell-tale
- utensil4778 2y ago
  Because TUIs never change. No one removes useful options from a TUI because "whitespace is clean". No one is writing useless changes to TUIs so they can feel like their job means something or to chase some bonus. Because GUI design today is very bad and only getting worse.
  - xp84 2y ago
    When I get to read comments like this is when I feel the most heard and understood. What you describe is pure fad-chasing, so I hope it swings back the other way while I’m still around to enjoy it.
- doix 2y ago
  Because terminal programs have limitations that limit the amount of annoying things programs can do. The color scheme matches the color scheme I set. They cannot change the font size nor the the font. They cannot spawn windows that will steal focus. They can run inside tmux which has advantages for my workflow. Hotkeys are a first class citizen and not an afterthought when it comes to terminal uis. That being said, I don't hate GUIs. I just hate a lot of them for doing things that annoy me.
  - unshavedyak 2y ago
    I do wish though that terms had multiple font sizes (with some limitations to make it "work"), to allow larger text but smaller gutters, etc. Aside from the general inefficient use of space, i adore terms. I do wish and hope more apps become like Zellij, though. With possible keybinds on the bottom, etc. I tend to avoid TUIs because i can't be arsed to remember the keybinds and prefer to just use CLIs since those are in my history.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      I think emacs have multiple font sizes/weights/families support (called font faces) and that's a reason people love it. The thing I like about term is that you're not confined to a single computer. You only need SSH to replicate your workflow anywhere (and a VPN, maybe). TUIs work better when you're committed to the workflow. Discoverability is not often one of the key features (although most seem to have great help pages and manuals). You chose one, take the time to learn it, configure it the way you want and it's better (not prettier) than most mouse based workflows.
      - opan 2y ago
        Emacs is one of the best GUI programs because they add functionality on top of the terminal version, like image support, different font sizes at once, and the window separators not being part of the text so highlighting text quickly is easier, but it keeps the first-class keyboard support it's always had. I think the average GUI was designed for mouse-first and the lowest common denominator, so it'll generally never be as good. It's similar to how irssi and weechat are top-tier chat programs, but nothing in the XMPP or Matrix world really seems as good.
- root_axis 2y ago
  GUIs are nice for exploration because you can (in principle) intuitively iterate through the application behaviors, but command line interfaces are far superior when you already know what you're doing.
  - opan 2y ago
    Digging through menus can be pretty frustrating. A way to search available commands and options would be ideal. Something like Emacs's M-x prompt suggesting commands as you type, and if you see nothing relevant you can try a different term. Even the basic actions the default keybinds do have equivalent commands you can run. I've heard of a setup relying on Unity's old global menu feature that then lets you use something like rofi to search all the menus in a GUI program at once, but sadly never got it working. Sounds like a dream. You didn't have to actually use Unity, just make programs think you were, presumably so they'd expose the information the right way.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Why do Linux users hate GUIs? Typically, because we find them inferior to CLIs/TUIs. A few possible reasons: * Graphical programs tend to use more memory/CPU for the same task. * Graphical programs are more likely to prefer/require the mouse. * Graphical programs seem to change their interface more frequently. * Graphical toolkits all seem to suck, in ways that vary by toolkit and version, and this suckage tends to make us actually notice more than ex. new versions of ncurses changing things under the hood. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of GUI programs that are great - some of them even better than CLI/TUI alternatives - but the odds seem to be stacked against them.
- jiehong 2y ago
  GUIs aren’t composable with other tools easily. Like, you can pipe CLIs together, and some TUIs accept a command and exit, allowing you to chain things together. On the web, your best bet might be playwright, but that’s about it. Imagine having GTK and QT applications able to be chained and exit automatically. On MacOS/iOS it’s not much better, even if Apple Shortcuts can feel ok sometimes, assuming the devs thought about allowing some actions to be available through shortcuts. On Linux, I think dbus was supposed to become the universal bus onto which all GUIs could provide services and do things together. It hasn’t panned out IMO.
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    >GUIs aren’t composable with other tools easily. None of the tools on display here are composable either, in fact almost all modern TUIs are literally indistinguishable from GUIs, using the same widgets and user paradigms you'd find in a desktop app, but reimplemented on top a text rendering engine, they're not CLI tools. It's basically the same thing we did on the web where webapps sort of pretend that they're not sitting on a text protocol but at least there it's out of necessity. On top of a functioning graphic stack there's no point for TUIs to exist.
  - wpm 2y ago
    Shortcuts is trash but Automator was and still is amazing.
- marmakoide 2y ago
  A well-made TUIs is really ergonomic and clutter-free. It can be maintained to high standard by one person. It doesn't take a lot of efforts to make composable tools, ie pipes. It uses little resources even for fancy TUIs. GUIs can be fine, but they are hard to get right, most are meh or just bad, and they are human resources sinks.
- techjamie 2y ago
  What doix said, but also if I tailor my workflow in the terminal, I can toss the same applications and configs onto my servers and use them the same way without installing a window manager and VNC onto it.
- godelski 2y ago
  I'm actually upvoting you. Not because I agree, but because this sentiment is so pervasive I need that responses highlighted instead of buried. Linux users don't hate GUIs. I say this as someone who's used Linux as a daily driver for 15 years! GUIs have their place, but they aren't for everything. There's are two main issues here 1) The terminal is far more flexible and lightweight. I can do so much more in my terminal and get far more done in less time by using the terminal. Learning a little bash can greatly increase your productivity. And on top of that, I can do this with little cost to resources. I live in the terminal not because it is pretty but because it's faster and more efficient. Yes, there's a learning curve but it pays dividends. 2) customization. Don't confuse this for aesthetics. Those do matter but you should see yourself as an expert craftsman. Your carpenter, engineer, etc all build tools, jigs, and other things to help them, especially with organization. Like them you should create the best environment for you. I know you were told I'm programming classes that the magic is to not keep writing the same lines but to wrap those up. This is the same thing. The aesthetics are so I can see the things I care about the most, not because it's pretty. The aliases and scripts I built are to prevent me from wasting time relooking up things I do intermittently but not frequent enough to memorize. Customization is incredibly hard in GUIs. Dragging and dropping things and half the time the whole fucking screen scrolls because it's hard to not do this. And even then, it gets corrected cluttered and you end up with this long tree of menues. But wait you say, just give it a macro! And at that point, what's the difference? In the terminal we recognize something fundamental: to know it's name is to have power over it. Yes, this isn't everyone. Every person is on a different part of their journey. And like I said, the customization is about making you productive not trying to find the most optimal, because that idea is laughable. There are good defaults but optimal is personal. This is why I'll always trust someone more when they live in the terminal. The GUI person might be faster at times but they're limited. The person who will fuck around and find out is the person who will eventually understand more about the complex things they work on. They're more likely to dig deep. And this is the thing silicon valley has lost, the sense of creating what can be, not what is, not someone else's vision but yours.
- jlarocco 2y ago
  Even on HN there's no nuance anymore. I suspect most Linux users don't "hate GUIs" but hate the garbage that GUIs enable, like pointless/stupid transition animations, hard to see flat UIs, dumbing down of preference/setting dialogs, etc. Most GUI design is focused on dumbing things down for first time and beginner users, and most Linux users don't fall into that demographic. If a GUI helps me get my work done faster then I'm all for it. If the GUI gets in my way and wastes my time then I'm not going to use it.
  - xp84 2y ago
    It’s the animations for me. I know it sounds crazy but I am a little bit angry every time I notice an action that is measurably slower than it needs to be because some “UX designer” (should not even be a job based on the BS I’ve seen) needed to justify his salary by blocking the UI process with a whiz-bang animation. Especially an action I have to do many times in a row, or all day long. I wish I could set the iOS global animation time to 0 like you could do back when you could jailbreak. (And no, reduce motion doesn’t help, it just replaces them with crossfades but still wastes the same amount of time)
    - thfuran 2y ago
      >“UX designer” (should not even be a job based on the BS I’ve seen) UX design is a real and valuable discipline, but it has been largely supplanted by what amounts to a fashion show.
      - xp84 2y ago
        Precisely. I’d rather go back to plain old UI, informed by the decades of experience we have with what is usable, and give these fad-chasing artists an island somewhere where they can screw around in Figma all day long without access to anyone who can build anything from their mocks.
- rscrawfo 2y ago
  As someone that used to agree with you, I’ve come to admit there are benefits. Information density and shortcut availability are two of the big ones. But the biggest for me is composability. I can query any data using their cli and open it in visidata nearly instantly. Just pipe it in. The interface is awesome compared to other query viewers I’ve found. It makes it easier to drill in and see results. Quick pivoting, Filtering and more
- prmoustache 2y ago
  They don't However with material design being the norm in gui there is nowadays barely any visual difference between a TUI and a GUI so it only come down to preferences: app optimized for keyboard or mouse use.
- bdd8f1df777b 2y ago
  I don't hate GUIs, but TUIs have their benefit. Most prominently it doesn't require display, which most servers don't have, and would take a lot of resources and latency if tunneled remotely.
- tptacek 2y ago
  My default assumption about GUI programs: they'll either work locally on my macOS developer machine and nowhere else, or they'll work nowhere I can use them. My default assumption about TUI programs: they'll work everywhere I work.
- sweeter 2y ago
  the difference between fumbling around a GUI file manager looking for the correctly named file and using one of the many solutions the terminal offers is night and day. GUI's are clumsy and prone to extremely odd failures where the only solution is to exit and reset. Greyed out buttons when they shouldnt be etc... The terminal doesn't have these problems, if something fails you can see the error, its immediately responsive always, its composable and scriptable. Consider cutting up audio clips in audacity, doing it by hand can take ages and the GUI can crash and screw you over. With the terminal you can just take 2 minutes to write a burner script and use it and be done in seconds. Its really hard to describe the positives of the terminal over a GUI because they are radically different things, and new users are going to have a tough time setting up a friendly environment, but if you can get past that its extremely easy to see why they handle certain tasks a million times more efficient and resiliently.
  - eviks 2y ago
    So in a good Windows file manager here is how you can fumble around looking for the correctly named file: press a single key enter part of a name get a fuzzy match for any file on your system in a separate tab (which you can return to later if needed) sort by path/size/image width to filter further press a key to preview file content or copy a file or delete it All that with immediate visual feedback What's your terminal day solution to this? > if something fails you can see the error, Or you can't, it just silently deleted the wrong files and you're non the wiser since you don't even see that your filter mismatched > With the terminal you can just take 2 minutes to write a burner script and use it and be done in seconds. How would you pick the audio times? In audacity you can easily play on cut thresholds to hear that they're correct, what's your "seconds" solution to that?
jjuel 2y ago
Isn't the terminal program technically a GUI?
- ghodith 2y ago
  Technically a TUI?
  - Hasnep 2y ago
    I think GP was referring to the terminal emulator, which normally has the minimal GUI decorations depending on the terminal emulator and your desktop environment.
hxegon 2y ago
A lot of the new tooling is in Go, superfile included. Noticed this after I started using LazyGit (incredible tool btw, I can't go back to anything else even after being a die hard Magit user for years) There's some stellar libraries in Go for terminal stuff, in particular anything from charmcli. They have an elm style TUI framework called bubbletea (which superfile uses), a styling library, prebuilt components, it's really incredible. I'm building a multiplayer tetris you can play through ssh, which is using bubbletea and another lib of theirs called wish. they have a lot of stuff you can just use in regular shell stuff too: https://charm.sh https://charm.sh
- leetrout 2y ago
  They are VC backed now which makes me wonder if they will do a license switch later or something else to monetize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126060
  - medstrom 2y ago
    I don't know about Charm so maybe someone can check their Github, but there's a dark pattern where you market yourself as open source but not all your components are actually released to the public, so you have a nice GitHub icon on your front page that just leads to silly minor extensions but not the main software. ObsidianMD does it.
    - mynameisvlad 2y ago
      Where does Obsidian claim they’re open source? Where have they ever done that? And no, having a GitHub icon does not magically announce to the world “we are open source”. In fact, their license page makes it abundantly clear they are not open source: > We own and reserve rights to our content, including text, images, and code in the app, which is protected by copyright and other laws. https://obsidian.md/license https://obsidian.md/license I get this argument if a company or product claimed it was open source and it wasn’t, but it just doesn’t work if the product in question makes it quite clear they are not, or even leaves it ambiguous.
deleted 2y ago
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snapplebobapple 2y ago
For me its rofi and a tiny bar on top of (ne of my hyprland windows for basic information (clock,calendar,widgets for network/volume/screenbrightness) its awesome

Love all the terminal tooling that's come out in recent years. I'm this close to chrome and rofi being the only gui I'm using on my work machine. This looks great!

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago

[flagged]

hiatus 2y ago
This program is available for multiple platforms, not just linux. Anyway, many people prefer keyboard navigation and already have a shell open for other tasks. Navigation by keyboard alone is not generally a feature in most GUI applications (see things like Vimium to add that capability to Chrome, for instance).
- Teever 2y ago
  Not only is it multiplatform, but through the magic of SSH TUIs are available on any platform. I think that a lot of people are drawn to the idea of being able to customize their UI the exact way they want it and have it be that way everywhere. There are compromises with TUIs but that idea of a universal interface is very alluring to some people who want to optimize that part of their life.
ykonstant 2y ago
That's too much generalization. I like skeuomorphic GUI with proper shadows, separators, color gradients, 2.5D borders, menus, etc. Nobody is offering those these days, so I gravitated towards TUI; I also have a lot of nostalgia for the DOS days, and although terminal emulation is worse than a proper command line, I make do.
- skydhash 2y ago
  I came on macOS on Mojave, but have seen Maverick and Lion screenshots and I've used iOS 6 as well. Flat UI can be prettier, but the physicality of skeuomorphic design is better for interaction. There was something more when interacting with Winamp instead of the current batch of audio players we have today. Win7 was great.
satvikpendem 2y ago
Keyboards are often faster than mice.
- eviks 2y ago
  GUIs recognize keyboard as a valid input option
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    They can but not always. For TUIs, it's mandatory.
    - eviks 2y ago
      Shortcuts, the things that actually make keyboard faster, aren't mandatory in a TUI
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        They're not mandatory, and indeed, less likely, in GUIs anyway, so I'm not sure the point you're arguing is with you.
        eviks 2y ago
        The point I'm arguing with is your made up benefit of TUIs re. keybinds
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        TUIs, in general, are more amenable to keyboard navigation than GUIs are; id est, even if GUIs offer keyboard navigation, they are simply not, on average, as good as those of TUIs. I'm not sure how that is controversial in the slightest.
        eviks 2y ago
schindlabua 2y ago
It's a slippery slope, once you've spent a year tailoring your setup it removes so much friction from those tasks you do 100 times a day. Sometimes I look at my macos coworkers and they have a single application on fullscreen and then they shake their mouse or whatever and 20 windows fly over the screen and then they scan them all to find the other window they are looking for, and I really wonder how they get work done. I use i3 and have 5 credit-card sized terminals open at any given time without taking up much screen real estate, and it's so great. Takes some getting used to though.
- something98 2y ago
  > Sometimes I look at my macos coworkers ... and I really wonder how they get work done And I read the sentence before and wonder the same: > once you've spent a year tailoring your setup
  - schindlabua 2y ago
    The irony is not lost on me but you can get productive if you spend a weekend configuring stuff and then you upgrade as you go :)
  - sophacles 2y ago
    In both cases during the "learn the tool" phase you end up spending time having to figure out how to do things, understand workflows etc. In the TUI case though, you can usually tweak that workflow and configure it to match your brand of thinking. It costs a little more per instance up front, but after that year (or whatever time period), you get a much less frustrating experience, and the oddball things your particular workflow requires have been smoothed out - where in the GUI you'd still be frustrated and a bit fumbly or suboptimal, so you continue to pay the penalty for it over time. It's really about how you amortize the total time put into using the tool.
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  >… macos coworkers and they have a single application on fullscreen… They are probably recent ex-Windows users struggling to understand a superficially similar but profoundly different WIMP paradigm. >… then they shake their mouse or whatever and 20 windows fly over the screen The fact that they can’t handle Mission Control is another tell-tale
utensil4778 2y ago
Because TUIs never change. No one removes useful options from a TUI because "whitespace is clean". No one is writing useless changes to TUIs so they can feel like their job means something or to chase some bonus. Because GUI design today is very bad and only getting worse.
- xp84 2y ago
  When I get to read comments like this is when I feel the most heard and understood. What you describe is pure fad-chasing, so I hope it swings back the other way while I’m still around to enjoy it.
doix 2y ago
Because terminal programs have limitations that limit the amount of annoying things programs can do. The color scheme matches the color scheme I set. They cannot change the font size nor the the font. They cannot spawn windows that will steal focus. They can run inside tmux which has advantages for my workflow. Hotkeys are a first class citizen and not an afterthought when it comes to terminal uis. That being said, I don't hate GUIs. I just hate a lot of them for doing things that annoy me.
- unshavedyak 2y ago
  I do wish though that terms had multiple font sizes (with some limitations to make it "work"), to allow larger text but smaller gutters, etc. Aside from the general inefficient use of space, i adore terms. I do wish and hope more apps become like Zellij, though. With possible keybinds on the bottom, etc. I tend to avoid TUIs because i can't be arsed to remember the keybinds and prefer to just use CLIs since those are in my history.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    I think emacs have multiple font sizes/weights/families support (called font faces) and that's a reason people love it. The thing I like about term is that you're not confined to a single computer. You only need SSH to replicate your workflow anywhere (and a VPN, maybe). TUIs work better when you're committed to the workflow. Discoverability is not often one of the key features (although most seem to have great help pages and manuals). You chose one, take the time to learn it, configure it the way you want and it's better (not prettier) than most mouse based workflows.
    - opan 2y ago
      Emacs is one of the best GUI programs because they add functionality on top of the terminal version, like image support, different font sizes at once, and the window separators not being part of the text so highlighting text quickly is easier, but it keeps the first-class keyboard support it's always had. I think the average GUI was designed for mouse-first and the lowest common denominator, so it'll generally never be as good. It's similar to how irssi and weechat are top-tier chat programs, but nothing in the XMPP or Matrix world really seems as good.
root_axis 2y ago
GUIs are nice for exploration because you can (in principle) intuitively iterate through the application behaviors, but command line interfaces are far superior when you already know what you're doing.
- opan 2y ago
  Digging through menus can be pretty frustrating. A way to search available commands and options would be ideal. Something like Emacs's M-x prompt suggesting commands as you type, and if you see nothing relevant you can try a different term. Even the basic actions the default keybinds do have equivalent commands you can run. I've heard of a setup relying on Unity's old global menu feature that then lets you use something like rofi to search all the menus in a GUI program at once, but sadly never got it working. Sounds like a dream. You didn't have to actually use Unity, just make programs think you were, presumably so they'd expose the information the right way.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> Why do Linux users hate GUIs? Typically, because we find them inferior to CLIs/TUIs. A few possible reasons: * Graphical programs tend to use more memory/CPU for the same task. * Graphical programs are more likely to prefer/require the mouse. * Graphical programs seem to change their interface more frequently. * Graphical toolkits all seem to suck, in ways that vary by toolkit and version, and this suckage tends to make us actually notice more than ex. new versions of ncurses changing things under the hood. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of GUI programs that are great - some of them even better than CLI/TUI alternatives - but the odds seem to be stacked against them.
jiehong 2y ago
GUIs aren’t composable with other tools easily. Like, you can pipe CLIs together, and some TUIs accept a command and exit, allowing you to chain things together. On the web, your best bet might be playwright, but that’s about it. Imagine having GTK and QT applications able to be chained and exit automatically. On MacOS/iOS it’s not much better, even if Apple Shortcuts can feel ok sometimes, assuming the devs thought about allowing some actions to be available through shortcuts. On Linux, I think dbus was supposed to become the universal bus onto which all GUIs could provide services and do things together. It hasn’t panned out IMO.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >GUIs aren’t composable with other tools easily. None of the tools on display here are composable either, in fact almost all modern TUIs are literally indistinguishable from GUIs, using the same widgets and user paradigms you'd find in a desktop app, but reimplemented on top a text rendering engine, they're not CLI tools. It's basically the same thing we did on the web where webapps sort of pretend that they're not sitting on a text protocol but at least there it's out of necessity. On top of a functioning graphic stack there's no point for TUIs to exist.
- wpm 2y ago
  Shortcuts is trash but Automator was and still is amazing.
marmakoide 2y ago
A well-made TUIs is really ergonomic and clutter-free. It can be maintained to high standard by one person. It doesn't take a lot of efforts to make composable tools, ie pipes. It uses little resources even for fancy TUIs. GUIs can be fine, but they are hard to get right, most are meh or just bad, and they are human resources sinks.
techjamie 2y ago
What doix said, but also if I tailor my workflow in the terminal, I can toss the same applications and configs onto my servers and use them the same way without installing a window manager and VNC onto it.
godelski 2y ago
I'm actually upvoting you. Not because I agree, but because this sentiment is so pervasive I need that responses highlighted instead of buried. Linux users don't hate GUIs. I say this as someone who's used Linux as a daily driver for 15 years! GUIs have their place, but they aren't for everything. There's are two main issues here 1) The terminal is far more flexible and lightweight. I can do so much more in my terminal and get far more done in less time by using the terminal. Learning a little bash can greatly increase your productivity. And on top of that, I can do this with little cost to resources. I live in the terminal not because it is pretty but because it's faster and more efficient. Yes, there's a learning curve but it pays dividends. 2) customization. Don't confuse this for aesthetics. Those do matter but you should see yourself as an expert craftsman. Your carpenter, engineer, etc all build tools, jigs, and other things to help them, especially with organization. Like them you should create the best environment for you. I know you were told I'm programming classes that the magic is to not keep writing the same lines but to wrap those up. This is the same thing. The aesthetics are so I can see the things I care about the most, not because it's pretty. The aliases and scripts I built are to prevent me from wasting time relooking up things I do intermittently but not frequent enough to memorize. Customization is incredibly hard in GUIs. Dragging and dropping things and half the time the whole fucking screen scrolls because it's hard to not do this. And even then, it gets corrected cluttered and you end up with this long tree of menues. But wait you say, just give it a macro! And at that point, what's the difference? In the terminal we recognize something fundamental: to know it's name is to have power over it. Yes, this isn't everyone. Every person is on a different part of their journey. And like I said, the customization is about making you productive not trying to find the most optimal, because that idea is laughable. There are good defaults but optimal is personal. This is why I'll always trust someone more when they live in the terminal. The GUI person might be faster at times but they're limited. The person who will fuck around and find out is the person who will eventually understand more about the complex things they work on. They're more likely to dig deep. And this is the thing silicon valley has lost, the sense of creating what can be, not what is, not someone else's vision but yours.
jlarocco 2y ago
Even on HN there's no nuance anymore. I suspect most Linux users don't "hate GUIs" but hate the garbage that GUIs enable, like pointless/stupid transition animations, hard to see flat UIs, dumbing down of preference/setting dialogs, etc. Most GUI design is focused on dumbing things down for first time and beginner users, and most Linux users don't fall into that demographic. If a GUI helps me get my work done faster then I'm all for it. If the GUI gets in my way and wastes my time then I'm not going to use it.
- xp84 2y ago
  It’s the animations for me. I know it sounds crazy but I am a little bit angry every time I notice an action that is measurably slower than it needs to be because some “UX designer” (should not even be a job based on the BS I’ve seen) needed to justify his salary by blocking the UI process with a whiz-bang animation. Especially an action I have to do many times in a row, or all day long. I wish I could set the iOS global animation time to 0 like you could do back when you could jailbreak. (And no, reduce motion doesn’t help, it just replaces them with crossfades but still wastes the same amount of time)
  - thfuran 2y ago
    >“UX designer” (should not even be a job based on the BS I’ve seen) UX design is a real and valuable discipline, but it has been largely supplanted by what amounts to a fashion show.
    - xp84 2y ago
      Precisely. I’d rather go back to plain old UI, informed by the decades of experience we have with what is usable, and give these fad-chasing artists an island somewhere where they can screw around in Figma all day long without access to anyone who can build anything from their mocks.
rscrawfo 2y ago
As someone that used to agree with you, I’ve come to admit there are benefits. Information density and shortcut availability are two of the big ones. But the biggest for me is composability. I can query any data using their cli and open it in visidata nearly instantly. Just pipe it in. The interface is awesome compared to other query viewers I’ve found. It makes it easier to drill in and see results. Quick pivoting, Filtering and more
prmoustache 2y ago
They don't However with material design being the norm in gui there is nowadays barely any visual difference between a TUI and a GUI so it only come down to preferences: app optimized for keyboard or mouse use.
bdd8f1df777b 2y ago
I don't hate GUIs, but TUIs have their benefit. Most prominently it doesn't require display, which most servers don't have, and would take a lot of resources and latency if tunneled remotely.
tptacek 2y ago
My default assumption about GUI programs: they'll either work locally on my macOS developer machine and nowhere else, or they'll work nowhere I can use them. My default assumption about TUI programs: they'll work everywhere I work.
sweeter 2y ago
the difference between fumbling around a GUI file manager looking for the correctly named file and using one of the many solutions the terminal offers is night and day. GUI's are clumsy and prone to extremely odd failures where the only solution is to exit and reset. Greyed out buttons when they shouldnt be etc... The terminal doesn't have these problems, if something fails you can see the error, its immediately responsive always, its composable and scriptable. Consider cutting up audio clips in audacity, doing it by hand can take ages and the GUI can crash and screw you over. With the terminal you can just take 2 minutes to write a burner script and use it and be done in seconds. Its really hard to describe the positives of the terminal over a GUI because they are radically different things, and new users are going to have a tough time setting up a friendly environment, but if you can get past that its extremely easy to see why they handle certain tasks a million times more efficient and resiliently.
- eviks 2y ago
  So in a good Windows file manager here is how you can fumble around looking for the correctly named file: press a single key enter part of a name get a fuzzy match for any file on your system in a separate tab (which you can return to later if needed) sort by path/size/image width to filter further press a key to preview file content or copy a file or delete it All that with immediate visual feedback What's your terminal day solution to this? > if something fails you can see the error, Or you can't, it just silently deleted the wrong files and you're non the wiser since you don't even see that your filter mismatched > With the terminal you can just take 2 minutes to write a burner script and use it and be done in seconds. How would you pick the audio times? In audacity you can easily play on cut thresholds to hear that they're correct, what's your "seconds" solution to that?

jjuel 2y ago

Isn't the terminal program technically a GUI?

ghodith 2y ago
Technically a TUI?
- Hasnep 2y ago
  I think GP was referring to the terminal emulator, which normally has the minimal GUI decorations depending on the terminal emulator and your desktop environment.

hxegon 2y ago

A lot of the new tooling is in Go, superfile included. Noticed this after I started using LazyGit (incredible tool btw, I can't go back to anything else even after being a die hard Magit user for years) There's some stellar libraries in Go for terminal stuff, in particular anything from charmcli. They have an elm style TUI framework called bubbletea (which superfile uses), a styling library, prebuilt components, it's really incredible. I'm building a multiplayer tetris you can play through ssh, which is using bubbletea and another lib of theirs called wish. they have a lot of stuff you can just use in regular shell stuff too: https://charm.sh https://charm.sh

leetrout 2y ago
They are VC backed now which makes me wonder if they will do a license switch later or something else to monetize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126060
- medstrom 2y ago
  I don't know about Charm so maybe someone can check their Github, but there's a dark pattern where you market yourself as open source but not all your components are actually released to the public, so you have a nice GitHub icon on your front page that just leads to silly minor extensions but not the main software. ObsidianMD does it.
  - mynameisvlad 2y ago
    Where does Obsidian claim they’re open source? Where have they ever done that? And no, having a GitHub icon does not magically announce to the world “we are open source”. In fact, their license page makes it abundantly clear they are not open source: > We own and reserve rights to our content, including text, images, and code in the app, which is protected by copyright and other laws. https://obsidian.md/license https://obsidian.md/license I get this argument if a company or product claimed it was open source and it wasn’t, but it just doesn’t work if the product in question makes it quite clear they are not, or even leaves it ambiguous.

deleted 2y ago

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snapplebobapple 2y ago

For me its rofi and a tiny bar on top of (ne of my hyprland windows for basic information (clock,calendar,widgets for network/volume/screenbrightness) its awesome