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> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for
by TazeTSchnitzel 6mo ago
> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s
Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse. This is the stuff I grew up with: QBASIC and EDIT.COM for example. Bisqwit has a cool video about how some apps from that era could have a proper mouse cursor, even: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nlNQcKsj74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nlNQcKsj74
- safety1st 6mo agoThe peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for the future.
- user3939382 6mo agoI hope it’s inevitable. Most users’ computing workloads by far are text oriented. The terminal is capable of flexbox now. Current GUIs create massive complexity and power draw relative to their value. Over a long enough arc, economic inefficiency is doomed.
- zahlman 6mo ago> The terminal is capable of flexbox now. You mean like https://silvery.dev/examples/layout.html https://silvery.dev/examples/layout.html ? This is definitely not a UI development paradigm I would have expected to see.
- user3939382 6mo agoThat’s the tip of a conceivable iceberg but exactly. Also look at kitty graphics protocol. Look at the amount of engineering resources we pour into OS GUI toolkits and then browsers. Those layers of complexity aren’t there because we stood back and said, “given what we know in 2026 how should we design a GUI compositor?”. The majority of the stack is written how it is by archeological happenstance. One generation adds on top of the prior since the 60s. I’d say start from the terminal, fix the rendering limitations that drove the split from terminal and then to the browser. If we pin down efficient GUI, we could have machines that cover non graphics workloads which is the vast majority with solar and the equivalent of a 6502. The amount of energy wasted on modern stacks relative to the tasks being delivered is incalculable.
- kode-targz 6mo agoI 100% agree, and this isna big reason why I find the current state of education so suboptimal. Everyone just goes on to do webdev, completely ignoring the lower levels and taking it all for granted. The thing is, there's no real innovation to be done that high up the stack. When you're that high you mostly just write glue code to stick parts someone else wrote together. Real innovation comes from quite a few levels down the stack, starting at the native code level downwards. Like you pointed out, the current stack is heavily unoptimized and has a terrible architecture; it's only the way it is because of happenstance and tides of the market (companies always reaching for faster over better). An actual "nirvana" in computing like the other guy said would require bulldozing a good chunk of our current stack, keeping only kernels and core utilities, if even. I really wish we had a bigger focus on getting good foundation instead of making yet another JS framework and SaaS, but then again, who's paying developers to actually do something of quality nowadays?
- lioeters 6mo agoComments like this is proof that the old-school hacker spirit is alive and kicking. This kind of pride in efficient and artful use of computers is needed more than ever.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- gf000 6mo agoBut why? You easily have 4k pixels, why use a tiny subset of those in a very inefficient way? We have proper hardware to make a bunch of these computations actually fast, and yet we should stuck with drawing relatively expensive text everywhere? If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind (though mostly as a guideline, it doesn't fit every workflow), but you can do that with a proper GUI just as well.
- cfiggers 6mo ago> If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind This is a confusing concession. Of course we love TUIs because of the UX, what other reason is there? Constraint breeds consistency and consistency breeds coherence. Take 1,000 random TUI designers and 1,000 random GUI designers and plot the variations between them (use any method you like)—the TUI designers will be more tightly clustered together because the TUI interface constrains what's reasonable. Yes of course you CAN recreate TUI-like UX in a GUI, that's not the issue. People don't. In a TUI they must. I like that UX and like that if I seek out a TUI for whatever thing I want to do, I'm highly likely to find a UX that I enjoy. Whereas with GUIs it's a crapshoot. That's it.
- Someone 6mo ago> the TUI designers will be more tightly clustered together because the TUI interface constrains what's reasonable. It constrains what’s possible, not what’s reasonable. For example, one could typically fit more text on a screen by compressing it, but most of the time, that’s not the reasonable thing to do. I’m saying most of the time because of the existence of English Braille (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Braille#System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Braille#System) which uses a compression scheme to compress frequently used words and character sequences such as ‘and’ and ‘ing’ shows that, if there is enough pressure to keep texts short, humans are willing to learn fairly idiosyncratic text compression schemes. colorforth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth) is another, way less popular example. It uses color to shorten program source code. One could also argue Unix, which uses a widely inconsistent ad-hoc compression scheme, writing “move” as “mv”, “copy” as “cp” or “cpy” (as in “strcpy”), etc. also shows that, but I think that would be a weaker argument.
- unleaded 6mo agoWhat's behind this new obsession with TUIs/CLIs anyway? You always had people obsessed with i3 and vim etc but this is something different.
- otabdeveloper4 6mo agoGet used to it, because with LLMs they're here to stay forever. (Bash will possibly be fossilized forever now, like the Latin alphabet.)
- vinceguidry 6mo agoNah. Folks will be building their own shells, I'm already half the way there.
- clickety_clack 6mo agoIt’s functionally focused and because most apps are web based now, and TUIs are generally local, it makes them seem relatively very fast.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo agoI think part of it is Visual Studio Code doing most IDE things very well, creating a market niche for terminal tooling that handles the rest. Certainly part of it is also people of my generation being nostalgic for the TUIs of DOS file managers and editors.
- rubslopes 6mo agoI was confused about why your comment was being downvoted; it sounded like an honest opinion... Until I got to the last sentence. You wrote a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- dwedge 6mo agoApart from being wayland and a more modern look, why are you excited about omarchy and AI and you weren't with i3?
- safety1st 6mo agoHow did you know that I use i3 on all my non-Omarchy machines? :D
- keybored 6mo agoPlain text coupled with non-deterministic interfaces (AI) is not great. It’s like a hybrid: some of the best of old school tech coupled with the most sketchy high tech. I will now get to have Kafkaesque conversations with computers in MarkDown.
- Telemakhos 6mo agoWe had "opinionated" TUIs with emacs, and Omarchy will never surpass emacs' ease, shallow learning curve, and configurability. Emacs is the operating system of the future, and you can already integrate AI with it. It provides everything you need or want or don't know you want except a decent text editor.
- vinceguidry 6mo agoI used emacs for years, switched to neovim last month. It's just too old and crufty for modern use, and modernizing frameworks like Doom / Spacemacs only add to the complexity. Nice modal workflows just go against emacs' nature.
- zie 6mo ago> It provides everything you need or want or don't know you want except a decent text editor. That's what evil is for :P
- TheEaterOfSouls 6mo agoI'm imagining a TTY-like interface that you can simultaneously type into, speak and gesture at, and whatever else I'm not thinking of (maybe with the "shell" creating a list of suggestions/ anticipating future tasks in the background based on voice input?) Doubt it would be at all practical, if only because the keyboard as a primary input device might not be as much of a thing when you can generate most code/text, but kinda fun to think about.
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- safety1st 6mo agoTo be fair, ShellGPT does a lot of heavy lifting for me. Weird thing I need to do, ask it a question in my terminal, it suggests a bash one-liner. I haven't looked into voice/dictation yet. I'm dumber when I talk and smarter when I type so while it's super cool I imagine the net productivity gain may be a little overstated. Probably pretty straightforward with OAI's API.
- saadn92 6mo agoNot just TUIs the whole stack is converging back to text. I run ~15 personal tools and every one that survived past the first month stores data as JSON/markdown in git repos. Text in git gives you versioning, sync, grep, and you can hand the whole thing to an LLM with zero serialization. It's perfect for me.
- ambicapter 6mo agoOh, the irony, I go to the website and the only thing it shows is a video to watch.
- SoftTalker 6mo agoI always liked Borland's code editor (would you call it an IDE?) from that era. The one that you used in Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal, etc. Text-mode versions of Wordperfect, Wordstar, and Lotus 1-2-3 were pretty good too.
- sixtyj 6mo agoWell, everything text-based is somehow calming, no need to touch mouse (and have a carpal tunnel).
- reaperducer 6mo agoWell, everything text-based is somehow calming, no need to touch mouse (and have a carpal tunnel). Carpal tunnel syndrome isn't exclusive to using a mouse. I dated a woman who had a severe case of it from using a mainframe terminal with no mouse.
- sixtyj 6mo agoMainframe terminals were nasty, I remember them. Similar high keys to recent keyboards that are so liked by gamers… but I get it. My dentist had a carpal tunnel that needed surgical procedure. If I don’t use mouse all day my hands are pretty much all right. Good mouse and keyboard is a key to productivity. Everytime I see someone using touchpad I don't get it. My fingers would be on fire in 10 minutes. People don't know what they're getting themselves into.
- SoftTalker 6mo agoMainframe terminals seemed to have the keyboards at a very high angle. Maybe that was to simulate the key height differences on mechanical typewriter, but for a computer keyboard I prefer them to be as flat as possible. I have not had any problem with CT since using flat keyboards.
- bombcar 6mo agoNorton/Midnight Commander might be close to peak TUI for me.