8 ms·

One justification for TUIs is remote access over SSH.

by banach 7mo ago

eterps 7mo ago
Sure, but my point was that UX matters for TUIs. A TUI with a UX that fits its paradigm , again like lazygit, works great over SSH.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
theowaway213456 7mo ago
You can tunnel a port over SSH and get a web UI locally, though it's not commonly done. I feel like more people would actually do this if tunneling a port was just ever so slightly easier (like, you're already SSH'd into a box, then you run a command, then you somehow automatically get a tunnel for that command's UI port plus a local browser window open to the page)
- roywiggins 7mo ago
  Even easier is just using an X server, if you have it set up properly you just need to run the remote app and the window pops up on your machine. (I think terminal-based GUIs are neat just for fluidity of use- you can pop one open during a terminal session and close it without switching to mouse or shifting your attention away from the terminal. They can also be a nice addon to a primarily CLI utility without introducing big dependencies)
  - wolvoleo 7mo ago
    Yeah I love that about X. I remember in the 90s when I first figured that out. I was logged in from a university workstation into my home computer with SSH and I launched my mail client or something and I thought doh, stupid that will only popup locally. Then colour my suprise when it popped up on my screen right there. Slow as molasses but still. Wow. Magic. It's a shame Wayland dropped this. Yes I know there's waypipe but it's not the same.
    - coldpie 7mo ago
      > It's a shame Wayland dropped this. It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.
      - duskdozer 7mo ago
        Like what? X forwarding has pretty much always been the thing most likely to work for me and I haven't been able to find any equivalent.
        coldpie 7mo ago
        The big obvious one is web-based tooling. Your information & settings are stored on a server and you use a web browser to view it via whatever device you're on. For more locally based workflows, we have networked filesystem protocols, automatic syncing between systems, that kind of thing. It's not a 1-1 equivalent of running a remote program and viewing it locally obviously, but it gets the same job done, in a much more useful & flexible manner than X forwarding did. For example, the remote mail client usecase I was replying to is simply done with a webmail client today.
        duskdozer 7mo ago
        I don't really feel like web interfaces or syncing are really a substitute tbh, and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens, and the program itself doesn't need to be designed differently to work
        coldpie 7mo ago
        > and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens But this doesn't work on your phone, or on a Windows or macOS device, right? That's what I meant by flexible, X forwarding fits a pretty narrow set of usecases, while on the other hand keeping programs on the clients and data centrally located on a server allows for a whole lot more options for how to interface with that data. (To be clear, nothing wrong with X forwarding! It's a cool tech and I'm glad you have a use for it! I'm just arguing that it's fine for Wayland to not try to support that kind of thing, because we've got other ways of working remotely now.)
- jasongill 7mo ago
  While in an SSH session, press enter, then type tilde and capital C (enter ~C) and you can add command line options to the current session. To add a port forward from your local 8080 to the remote port 80 without closing the connection, do: enter ~C -L 8080:localhost:80
  - zimpenfish 7mo ago
    That is a neat trick. Added to the list. (Ultimately unhelpful though because I use mosh everywhere these days and that doesn't appear to have anything fancy like this.)
  - dylan604 7mo ago
    Maybe it's just still too early in the morning yet, but what is the significance of hitting enter first?
    - jasongill 7mo ago
      SSH expects the escape sequence (tilde) to be the first character on a new line; since backspace is sent as a character, you can't just backspace over something you've started typing and then press tilde to have it recognized. Technically, you don't have to press enter if you've not typed anything (try it in a new SSH session - as soon as you are logged in, type ~? to get the SSH help output), but since the comment was about doing this during an active session without ending it, I figured noting that pressing enter first to be sure you're on a new line wouldn't hurt
  - Tepix 7mo ago
    Thanks. This could really benefit from a TUI!
- wolvoleo 7mo ago
  I do this a lot but I'd still prefer TUI where possible. With too much visual content it isn't of course, but for many cases a TUI is much more responsive and much lower resource.
  - surajrmal 7mo ago
    I largely agree with you, but there are limits to what a tui can do well. If analyzing a flame graph or performance trace, web UI is a better fit. However, most things are not that.
- yoz-y 7mo ago
  I like TUIs because I run everything in tmux and I can just pick up work from wherever I was on any computer, phone or tablet.
  - DesiLurker 7mo ago
    share some good (easy on remembering keyboard & mouse) tmux configs. I usually struggle with copy pasting many scrollback lines from/to tmux. would love for my claude to be natively tmux aware.
    - yoz-y 7mo ago
      I usually copy with mouse and paste with ctrl+b ], or use the iterm selection to copy to macOS clipboard. For navigation between windows I have this: bind -n S-Left select-pane -L bind -n S-Right select-pane -R bind -n S-Up select-pane -U bind -n S-Down select-pane -D # Control shift arrow to resize panes bind -n S-C-Left resize-pane -L 5 bind -n S-C-Down resize-pane -D 5 bind -n S-C-Up resize-pane -U 5 bind -n S-C-Right resize-pane -R 5 # Shift arrow to switch windows bind -n M-S-Left previous-window bind -n M-S-Right next-window bind -n S-Home previous-window bind -n S-End next-window # No delay for escape key press set -sg escape-time 0 set-option -g repeat-time 0
- marxisttemp 7mo ago
  I'd rather use a TUI than a web UI.
papageek 7mo ago
Another justification could be simply some people like using them better.

One justification for TUIs is remote access over SSH.

by banach 7mo ago

One justification for TUIs is remote access over SSH.

Sure, but my point was that UX matters for TUIs. A TUI with a UX that fits its paradigm , again like lazygit, works great over SSH.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

theowaway213456 7mo ago

You can tunnel a port over SSH and get a web UI locally, though it's not commonly done. I feel like more people would actually do this if tunneling a port was just ever so slightly easier (like, you're already SSH'd into a box, then you run a command, then you somehow automatically get a tunnel for that command's UI port plus a local browser window open to the page)

roywiggins 7mo ago
Even easier is just using an X server, if you have it set up properly you just need to run the remote app and the window pops up on your machine. (I think terminal-based GUIs are neat just for fluidity of use- you can pop one open during a terminal session and close it without switching to mouse or shifting your attention away from the terminal. They can also be a nice addon to a primarily CLI utility without introducing big dependencies)
- wolvoleo 7mo ago
  Yeah I love that about X. I remember in the 90s when I first figured that out. I was logged in from a university workstation into my home computer with SSH and I launched my mail client or something and I thought doh, stupid that will only popup locally. Then colour my suprise when it popped up on my screen right there. Slow as molasses but still. Wow. Magic. It's a shame Wayland dropped this. Yes I know there's waypipe but it's not the same.
  - coldpie 7mo ago
    > It's a shame Wayland dropped this. It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.
    - duskdozer 7mo ago
      Like what? X forwarding has pretty much always been the thing most likely to work for me and I haven't been able to find any equivalent.
      - coldpie 7mo ago
        The big obvious one is web-based tooling. Your information & settings are stored on a server and you use a web browser to view it via whatever device you're on. For more locally based workflows, we have networked filesystem protocols, automatic syncing between systems, that kind of thing. It's not a 1-1 equivalent of running a remote program and viewing it locally obviously, but it gets the same job done, in a much more useful & flexible manner than X forwarding did. For example, the remote mail client usecase I was replying to is simply done with a webmail client today.
        duskdozer 7mo ago
        I don't really feel like web interfaces or syncing are really a substitute tbh, and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens, and the program itself doesn't need to be designed differently to work
        coldpie 7mo ago
        > and I'm not sure how they're more flexible. ssh -> run -> gui opens But this doesn't work on your phone, or on a Windows or macOS device, right? That's what I meant by flexible, X forwarding fits a pretty narrow set of usecases, while on the other hand keeping programs on the clients and data centrally located on a server allows for a whole lot more options for how to interface with that data. (To be clear, nothing wrong with X forwarding! It's a cool tech and I'm glad you have a use for it! I'm just arguing that it's fine for Wayland to not try to support that kind of thing, because we've got other ways of working remotely now.)
jasongill 7mo ago
While in an SSH session, press enter, then type tilde and capital C (enter ~C) and you can add command line options to the current session. To add a port forward from your local 8080 to the remote port 80 without closing the connection, do: enter ~C -L 8080:localhost:80
- zimpenfish 7mo ago
  That is a neat trick. Added to the list. (Ultimately unhelpful though because I use mosh everywhere these days and that doesn't appear to have anything fancy like this.)
- dylan604 7mo ago
  Maybe it's just still too early in the morning yet, but what is the significance of hitting enter first?
  - jasongill 7mo ago
    SSH expects the escape sequence (tilde) to be the first character on a new line; since backspace is sent as a character, you can't just backspace over something you've started typing and then press tilde to have it recognized. Technically, you don't have to press enter if you've not typed anything (try it in a new SSH session - as soon as you are logged in, type ~? to get the SSH help output), but since the comment was about doing this during an active session without ending it, I figured noting that pressing enter first to be sure you're on a new line wouldn't hurt
- Tepix 7mo ago
  Thanks. This could really benefit from a TUI!
wolvoleo 7mo ago
I do this a lot but I'd still prefer TUI where possible. With too much visual content it isn't of course, but for many cases a TUI is much more responsive and much lower resource.
- surajrmal 7mo ago
  I largely agree with you, but there are limits to what a tui can do well. If analyzing a flame graph or performance trace, web UI is a better fit. However, most things are not that.
yoz-y 7mo ago
I like TUIs because I run everything in tmux and I can just pick up work from wherever I was on any computer, phone or tablet.
- DesiLurker 7mo ago
  share some good (easy on remembering keyboard & mouse) tmux configs. I usually struggle with copy pasting many scrollback lines from/to tmux. would love for my claude to be natively tmux aware.
  - yoz-y 7mo ago
    I usually copy with mouse and paste with ctrl+b ], or use the iterm selection to copy to macOS clipboard. For navigation between windows I have this: bind -n S-Left select-pane -L bind -n S-Right select-pane -R bind -n S-Up select-pane -U bind -n S-Down select-pane -D # Control shift arrow to resize panes bind -n S-C-Left resize-pane -L 5 bind -n S-C-Down resize-pane -D 5 bind -n S-C-Up resize-pane -U 5 bind -n S-C-Right resize-pane -R 5 # Shift arrow to switch windows bind -n M-S-Left previous-window bind -n M-S-Right next-window bind -n S-Home previous-window bind -n S-End next-window # No delay for escape key press set -sg escape-time 0 set-option -g repeat-time 0
marxisttemp 7mo ago
I'd rather use a TUI than a web UI.

papageek 7mo ago

Another justification could be simply some people like using them better.