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The tide is going to turn on this in the second half of 2026. There have always been nerds who just love TUIs, and still read their email in Mutt. But I think t
by tptacek 6mo ago
The tide is going to turn on this in the second half of 2026. There have always been nerds who just love TUIs, and still read their email in Mutt. But I think the subtext of this article is right, that TUIs are back because of how much of a pain UI development is.
But that's changed drastically in the last few months. I spent the weekend doing SwiftUI stuff with Claude, with a lot of success. It's going to get much easier to ship fast, solid, native UIs for things, and native UI is both very fun to build and also attractive to ordinary users.
(Fun green field for doing interesting UI work: do native UI for remote server stuff, like an htop UI that uses some dialect of SSH to fetch remote data.)
I think modern TUIs are a blip. A big, important blip. But a blip. The age of the Orc is over. The time of the Human Interface Guideline has come.
- dlivingston 6mo agoThat still doesn't address the root of the problem, which is that TUIs and Electron apps are write-once, run-anywhere, while native GUI dev is insanely fragmented. I mean, I guess that's more or less just a summary of the blog post, but it's true. And it will remain true until the fragmentation ends, and the fragmentation won't end until Microsoft gets its act together and ships their version of SwiftUI so that some sort of abstraction layer over SwiftUI/GTK/MsftUI can be created. And since Microsoft will almost certainly never get its act together, the problem will remain. In other words, not a blip. The UIs of the present and future will all be Electron apps and TUIs.
- Ekaros 6mo agoWhy not instead have Linux just run Win32 applications?
- dlivingston 6mo agoThat's really not a solution. You're not targeting the host OS for that, which instantly kills that approach for everything other than "we need this to run on Linux and don't care how." You're shipping all of WINE with it. You're sticking out like a sore thumb with Win32 widgets next to the rest of your GTK apps. Etc etc etc.
- PunchyHamster 6mo agohow's that any different than electron, it's also sticking out with all of its widgets being different than native
- dlivingston 6mo agoMaterially, it's not. Which is what I'm arguing.
- d3Xt3r 6mo ago- You don't have to ship Wine with it, you can just make it a runtime/package dependency. Most distros have Wine in their repos anyways, so there's no need to bundle it. I don't see this conceptually being any different than shipping a Python app for instance. - You can make Wine apps inherit the system theme, well, at least the colors. Although it will still look out of place, but it's not much different to the issues with running a Qt app in GNOME, or a GTK app in KDE. Wine in this case can be considered as just another UI toolkit that has the same problem that all UI toolkits have in Linux. - Finally, the resource overhead of Wine is far, far lesser compared to Electron, which is a basically packing in a full-fledged browser.
- tptacek 6mo agoWhat does it matter how fragmented the platforms are? I feel like this isn't sinking in with people. I was chatting with a friend last night about a SwiftUI app that I'd built and he'd pitched in on. He then reimplemented --- didn't port it, reimplemented it, for WinUI, that night, with just a couple prompts. I am, in a proverbial sense, buying puts on Electron.
- nzoschke 6mo agoI agree, the LLM porting things is a game changer. Does it also follow that we can have pretty much any shape for valuable apps? API, CLI, TUI, Web, SwiftUI, WinUI...
- tptacek 6mo agoYes. Developers are conditioned to expect the only convenient answer is a TUI (actually, a CLI; TUIs are show-off projects most of the time) and, if you really want to go all out, Electron. That's not the case anymore.
- colesantiago 6mo ago[flagged]
- tptacek 6mo agoEvery time I read a comment like this, I flash to the episode of the Office where Michael steals one of Dwight's clients while Dwight is on the phone with him in the car. He pitches the client, and Dwight screams into his phone "ARE YOU SAYING YOU INVENTED PAPER?!" No, friend-o, I'm not saying htop and emacs are show-off projects --- though everyone I know who uses Emacs (myself included) uses graphical emacs. My point is that most developer tooling is CLI, not TUI; most developer tools are shop jigs, not packaged tools. Though most of the packaged tools: also CLIs! All of them can very quickly be made into native UIs, though. You'll get further on HN not calling people "very dishonest".
- logickkk1 6mo agoif ai makes native rewrites cheap, "write once run anywhere" matters a lot less. tuis stick around for dev workflows, not for shipping to users.
- tptacek 6mo agoI do get that, but developers like native UI too. You can tell by how much we gripe about Electron!