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Looking at their demos immediately brought back the memories of parsing TUI's using ad-hoc "expect" rules. I honestly don't get the point of TUIs... A real co

by theamk 2y ago

Looking at their demos immediately brought back the memories of parsing TUI's using ad-hoc "expect" rules. I honestly don't get the point of TUIs... A real command-line interface is extremely useful - it's trivially scriptable, works direct or with ssh, scroll-back buffer logs what happened, commands stay in my shell history, I can copy-paste commands to a friend over chat system, or into shell script, and it's easy for app authors too. Its my first choice for my apps. If low-color fixed-width character grid is not cutting it, then native app or web app is a great second step, or even intermediate solutions, like generating HTML files from CLI tool and opening them in default browser. You have to invest some effort, but you have infinite ways to design your interface, and it's still in user's familiar environment. But those charm.sh TUI applications seem utterly useless and highly annoying. They give up all of the terminal advantages: my shell's history is useless, my favorite ways to edit commands does not apply (as they have their own editor), I cannot scroll back and see what the program just printed, I cannot script it, I cannot log it, I cannot search it, I cannot redo the previous action, the color scheme is not the one I've picked... At least with web apps I can parse html and/or hit underlying API directly - no such luck with TUI apps. At least the good news is that TUI apps are not getting any traction, and I can completely understand why.

PhilippGille 2y ago
> At least the good news is that TUI apps are not getting any traction, and I can completely understand why. lazygit (54k stars on GitHub) and k9s got a lot of traction and are very popular: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/derailed/k9s https://github.com/derailed/k9s
darkwater 2y ago
I totally agree with you, I prefer good autocomplete to a TUI for all these reasons (and more). Well, I actually prefer any CLI to a TUI. The most TUI thing I use in my toolkit is `top` (yes, the "classic" one)
houzi 2y ago
TUI's have one thing going for them: Copy paste anything! IntelliJ doesn't let me copy any text it shows me. Also, TUI's have their place. I haven't looked much at GUI alternatives, but k9s is really great. Would also assume that interactive apps are simpler to implement if it's a TUI.
Shugyousha 2y ago
> I honestly don't get the point of TUIs... There are one or two advantages over regular GUIs, but that's it. The biggest is probably that they are lightweight since there are no GUI library dependencies (and if there are TUI ones, they are usually much lighter than their GUI sisters). This also means there are fewer (if any) dependencies to distribute compared to a GUI. The only other advantage I can come up with is that a TUI will have to be usable by keyboard only (in almost all cases). This is not a given for regular GUI libraries. I'm not a fan of TUIs either. I think the only one I am using regularly is `tig` (https://jonas.github.io/tig/ https://jonas.github.io/tig/). I guess the reason is that I don't have to remember the git revision list syntax that way and that `tig` allows for easy commit searching with `/` ...
skydhash 2y ago
The TUI apps I use regularly are: * lf (file manager) * vim * htop * moc and ncmpcpp (music) * emacs (which is its own world) TUI apps are great for one-time actions that needs feedback, especially having a list of something, filtering it, and applying an action on one or more items. But, I still like to have a CLI version so I can script any reccuring workflow.

by theamk 2y ago

PhilippGille 2y ago

> At least the good news is that TUI apps are not getting any traction, and I can completely understand why. lazygit (54k stars on GitHub) and k9s got a lot of traction and are very popular: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/derailed/k9s https://github.com/derailed/k9s

darkwater 2y ago

I totally agree with you, I prefer good autocomplete to a TUI for all these reasons (and more). Well, I actually prefer any CLI to a TUI. The most TUI thing I use in my toolkit is `top` (yes, the "classic" one)

houzi 2y ago

TUI's have one thing going for them: Copy paste anything! IntelliJ doesn't let me copy any text it shows me. Also, TUI's have their place. I haven't looked much at GUI alternatives, but k9s is really great. Would also assume that interactive apps are simpler to implement if it's a TUI.

Shugyousha 2y ago

> I honestly don't get the point of TUIs... There are one or two advantages over regular GUIs, but that's it. The biggest is probably that they are lightweight since there are no GUI library dependencies (and if there are TUI ones, they are usually much lighter than their GUI sisters). This also means there are fewer (if any) dependencies to distribute compared to a GUI. The only other advantage I can come up with is that a TUI will have to be usable by keyboard only (in almost all cases). This is not a given for regular GUI libraries. I'm not a fan of TUIs either. I think the only one I am using regularly is `tig` (https://jonas.github.io/tig/ https://jonas.github.io/tig/). I guess the reason is that I don't have to remember the git revision list syntax that way and that `tig` allows for easy commit searching with `/` ...

skydhash 2y ago

The TUI apps I use regularly are: * lf (file manager) * vim * htop * moc and ncmpcpp (music) * emacs (which is its own world) TUI apps are great for one-time actions that needs feedback, especially having a list of something, filtering it, and applying an action on one or more items. But, I still like to have a CLI version so I can script any reccuring workflow.