4 ms·

No. I like them.

danpalmer 1mo ago
What do you like about them? I disagree, but so many people seem to like them that I assume I'm missing something. The main one I've heard before is that they work nicely over SSH, but I assume there must be more?
- TurboHaskal 1mo ago
  I don't think TUIs are inherently better but some are simply too good versus the alternative. magit and k9s for example.
  - anon7000 1mo ago
    Also CLI args to TUI are very useful. Like the k9s command flag to take you to any view. It feels more immediate than launching a separate app from the terminal
- mrheosuper 1mo ago
  Lightweight and can run over ssh are 2 main reasons i like them.
- duskdozer 1mo ago
  (other user) in my typical experience: - keyboard can be used for pretty much everything - less visually busy (no/less animations, background images/color variations. often close to plain text on plain background) - more information dense (fewer things hidden behind hamburger menus, modals, drawers, etc) - more/more easily customizable and documented - more often can provide data directly into the terminal that I'm working in, so don't need to copy/paste through windows etc these aren't necessarily impossible for GUI or universally true for TUI, but maybe I would guess just more an artifact of there being types of people who prefer working in the terminal who are then more likely to make TUIs, and I share their preferences more.
- takluyver 1mo ago
  In addition to what other people have said, the terminal interface is cross-platform and very stable, so TUIs need little or no maintenance to keep working.
- nimih 1mo ago
  I personally like making (and using) TUIs because: - They encourage developing simpler, information-dense, and keyboard-driven interfaces, which I tend to prefer in general. - I find them more fun to write, and less aggravating to maintain and debug, than interfaces built with GUI toolkits. - Most software I write for personal use is going to be run in both a Linux and Mac OS environment (and a lot of the time on a headless server to boot), and a TUI often has less fuss than other options (at least, IME). - I think monospaced text in a terminal just looks cool.
  - annapanna 1mo ago
    But you can't really do information dense when you are limited to a fixed grid of monospaced character glyphs. Variable width fonts are much more information dense for example.
    - croon 1mo ago
      I prefer TUIs personally, but I can't see myself use maps, or visual image editing in a TUI for example, but is vi infinitely faster than vscode for manipulating a codebase? Absolutely. Anything that lends itself to keyboard input, piping, text manipulation and a bunch of other things are so much faster if you're equally proficient in both input modes.
    - nimih 1mo ago
      By "information dense," I meant in contrast to what is typical in modern GUIs: generous borders and margins between interface elements, large buttons, etc. My experience both using and writing TUIs is that, because of the extreme limitations of your tools w/r/t styling and layout, more of the screen real estate tends to be devoted to displaying data, and on whole I prefer that. YMMV, of course, I'm just sharing my own experience and perspective.
  - beej71 1mo ago
    I think the "fun as hell to write and use" angle is underrepresented in the comments—thanks for bringing it up. It is, of course, completely subjective, but I know there are a fair number of people out there who agree with that statement.
- barnabee 1mo ago
  IMHO the rise of TUIs is heavily correlated with the near-abandonment of professional quality graphical interfaces. If there was a powerful, information dense, configurable docking/tiling, multi-application-composing GUI framework (all things a good terminal can do) then yes, build everything in that. I’d love to see it. Until then, TUIs are vastly better than another Electron app or Mac app using UI frameworks that are trying their hardest to look and act like basic phone apps.
  - anon7000 1mo ago
    Nailed it. As the blog post says, GUI’s aren’t normally written for nerds. They exist, but it’s not normal. So even professional tools all follow industry design and product trends which are too simplistic, don’t give you the info you need, and are optimized for abstract brand design or chasing metrics for the company, and not optimized for “how do I let my user accomplish their task as fast as possible”
  - funlang 1mo ago
    [flagged]
- skeledrew 1mo ago
  It's easier to automate TUIs, since it's just text.
  - benj111 1mo ago
    Nit. Surely it would be keyboard navigation? Your macro can consist of the key presses you would actually use, rather than trying to describe mouse movement. If you want to automate from the perspective of what's on screen, tuis have no metadata. A button in a gui does have metadata associated with it, so you could automate 'click button x' where as in a TUI you'd be limited to clicking 'position x,y'
    - skeledrew 1mo ago
      You don't really need metadata to automate in a terminal. Literally everything is there in the clear and ANSI is used for control. It's all characters; no need to think about pixels (I made something that automates TUIs[0] BTW. For GUIs you have to handle the particular metadata of a given framework, if it exposes metadata at all for the controls. Otherwise you're dealing with raw pixels which is an instant nightmare, though not so much now there are visual LLMs, but you're still paying for the tokens and/or extra processing. [0] https://gitlab.com/skeledrew/jaiver https://gitlab.com/skeledrew/jaiver
      - benj111 1mo ago
        Ah ok. I was thinking from the perspective of automating the input, for a human to view, rather than automatically getting data out.
        skeledrew 1mo ago
        Automating input is just sending character codes. It's all wonderfully simple and uniform.
- jmorenoamor 1mo ago
  A good UI can be text, graphic, voice, etc. I enjoy the usability and self perceived speed of not having to leave the console or reach the mouse to move a pointer when a cople of key presees is enough. It's a matter of choice, I know, but I also think there is a genuine case for text over graphics. I see it everyday on businesses that keep old cobol tpvs at the cash, the speed at which the clercks check inventories or perform other crm activities is unmatched to mouse or touch interfaces
- Kon5ole 1mo ago
  I also like them so I can mention some things that spring to mind: - Some are very good tools that have no clear GUI superiors. Vim, Emacs, Mc for example. GUI wrappers over these don't make them better. - Efficient, meaning fast and limited in scope so you can learn the whole thing. - The muscle memory you develop is transferable to any new platform or OS you use. - Often free and OSS so they can't be taken away, making the muscle memory a long-term investment. - If you work in the terminal for any other reason there's less context switch.
  - bcrl 1mo ago
    Muscle memory and awful connectivity in remote places (well, not even that remote for me) is what so many GUI apps undervalue, and I don't think the author of the article has ever thought of or encountered this. I loved TUIs back in the '80s and '90s when convention was so consistent across applications that muscle memory transferred seamlessly. Plus one could use a mouse to select menu options or the keyboard (like the many Microsoft programming environments like QuickBASIC, QuickC, Microsoft C as well as competitor products like Turbo Pascal and many others). The low bandwidth / high latency lossy link problem is still a major issue. Cell phone service is sufficiently shitty in the area I live in that I have to use mosh to get a usable remote connection many times a year. Mosh is also quite useful while travelling! Got a crappy connection on a train or airplane? No problem. I have so much muscle memory with the mutt email client that nothing else has ever come close. Where's the equivalent of mutt's limit command in Thunderbird? Try getting a usable VNC session when your cell phone hot spot is hitting 2-30 second ping times (yes -- thirty seconds) with only a handful of packets getting through. Version 2 of the Amiga's operating system did a great thing in version 2 of AmigaOS which explicitly spelled out what conventions to apply (see Amiga User Interface Style Guide at https://archive.org/details/amiga-user-interface-style-guide https://archive.org/details/amiga-user-interface-style-guide). Modern GUIs that have weird meaningless buttons are infuriating. Even moreso when they lack obvious keyboard shortcuts.
- Linux-Fan 1mo ago
  I use the terminal for most things which are not web browsing hence for me it makes sense to prefer TUIs for "lightweight" GUI needs. I love how I have to configure font size and family only once in the terminal emulator and not for each program/GUI toolkit again. Of course, there is no way to replace graphical-heavy programs (GIMP, QGIS etc.) with TUIs. <https://masysma.net/37/why_terminal.xhtml https://masysma.net/37/why_terminal.xhtml>
- catlover76 1mo ago
  [dead]

No. I like them.

What do you like about them? I disagree, but so many people seem to like them that I assume I'm missing something. The main one I've heard before is that they work nicely over SSH, but I assume there must be more?

TurboHaskal 1mo ago
I don't think TUIs are inherently better but some are simply too good versus the alternative. magit and k9s for example.
- anon7000 1mo ago
  Also CLI args to TUI are very useful. Like the k9s command flag to take you to any view. It feels more immediate than launching a separate app from the terminal
mrheosuper 1mo ago
Lightweight and can run over ssh are 2 main reasons i like them.
duskdozer 1mo ago
(other user) in my typical experience: - keyboard can be used for pretty much everything - less visually busy (no/less animations, background images/color variations. often close to plain text on plain background) - more information dense (fewer things hidden behind hamburger menus, modals, drawers, etc) - more/more easily customizable and documented - more often can provide data directly into the terminal that I'm working in, so don't need to copy/paste through windows etc these aren't necessarily impossible for GUI or universally true for TUI, but maybe I would guess just more an artifact of there being types of people who prefer working in the terminal who are then more likely to make TUIs, and I share their preferences more.
takluyver 1mo ago
In addition to what other people have said, the terminal interface is cross-platform and very stable, so TUIs need little or no maintenance to keep working.
nimih 1mo ago
I personally like making (and using) TUIs because: - They encourage developing simpler, information-dense, and keyboard-driven interfaces, which I tend to prefer in general. - I find them more fun to write, and less aggravating to maintain and debug, than interfaces built with GUI toolkits. - Most software I write for personal use is going to be run in both a Linux and Mac OS environment (and a lot of the time on a headless server to boot), and a TUI often has less fuss than other options (at least, IME). - I think monospaced text in a terminal just looks cool.
- annapanna 1mo ago
  But you can't really do information dense when you are limited to a fixed grid of monospaced character glyphs. Variable width fonts are much more information dense for example.
  - croon 1mo ago
    I prefer TUIs personally, but I can't see myself use maps, or visual image editing in a TUI for example, but is vi infinitely faster than vscode for manipulating a codebase? Absolutely. Anything that lends itself to keyboard input, piping, text manipulation and a bunch of other things are so much faster if you're equally proficient in both input modes.
  - nimih 1mo ago
    By "information dense," I meant in contrast to what is typical in modern GUIs: generous borders and margins between interface elements, large buttons, etc. My experience both using and writing TUIs is that, because of the extreme limitations of your tools w/r/t styling and layout, more of the screen real estate tends to be devoted to displaying data, and on whole I prefer that. YMMV, of course, I'm just sharing my own experience and perspective.
- beej71 1mo ago
  I think the "fun as hell to write and use" angle is underrepresented in the comments—thanks for bringing it up. It is, of course, completely subjective, but I know there are a fair number of people out there who agree with that statement.
barnabee 1mo ago
IMHO the rise of TUIs is heavily correlated with the near-abandonment of professional quality graphical interfaces. If there was a powerful, information dense, configurable docking/tiling, multi-application-composing GUI framework (all things a good terminal can do) then yes, build everything in that. I’d love to see it. Until then, TUIs are vastly better than another Electron app or Mac app using UI frameworks that are trying their hardest to look and act like basic phone apps.
- anon7000 1mo ago
  Nailed it. As the blog post says, GUI’s aren’t normally written for nerds. They exist, but it’s not normal. So even professional tools all follow industry design and product trends which are too simplistic, don’t give you the info you need, and are optimized for abstract brand design or chasing metrics for the company, and not optimized for “how do I let my user accomplish their task as fast as possible”
- funlang 1mo ago
  [flagged]
skeledrew 1mo ago
It's easier to automate TUIs, since it's just text.
- benj111 1mo ago
  Nit. Surely it would be keyboard navigation? Your macro can consist of the key presses you would actually use, rather than trying to describe mouse movement. If you want to automate from the perspective of what's on screen, tuis have no metadata. A button in a gui does have metadata associated with it, so you could automate 'click button x' where as in a TUI you'd be limited to clicking 'position x,y'
  - skeledrew 1mo ago
    You don't really need metadata to automate in a terminal. Literally everything is there in the clear and ANSI is used for control. It's all characters; no need to think about pixels (I made something that automates TUIs[0] BTW. For GUIs you have to handle the particular metadata of a given framework, if it exposes metadata at all for the controls. Otherwise you're dealing with raw pixels which is an instant nightmare, though not so much now there are visual LLMs, but you're still paying for the tokens and/or extra processing. [0] https://gitlab.com/skeledrew/jaiver https://gitlab.com/skeledrew/jaiver
    - benj111 1mo ago
      Ah ok. I was thinking from the perspective of automating the input, for a human to view, rather than automatically getting data out.
      - skeledrew 1mo ago
        Automating input is just sending character codes. It's all wonderfully simple and uniform.
jmorenoamor 1mo ago
A good UI can be text, graphic, voice, etc. I enjoy the usability and self perceived speed of not having to leave the console or reach the mouse to move a pointer when a cople of key presees is enough. It's a matter of choice, I know, but I also think there is a genuine case for text over graphics. I see it everyday on businesses that keep old cobol tpvs at the cash, the speed at which the clercks check inventories or perform other crm activities is unmatched to mouse or touch interfaces
Kon5ole 1mo ago
I also like them so I can mention some things that spring to mind: - Some are very good tools that have no clear GUI superiors. Vim, Emacs, Mc for example. GUI wrappers over these don't make them better. - Efficient, meaning fast and limited in scope so you can learn the whole thing. - The muscle memory you develop is transferable to any new platform or OS you use. - Often free and OSS so they can't be taken away, making the muscle memory a long-term investment. - If you work in the terminal for any other reason there's less context switch.
- bcrl 1mo ago
  Muscle memory and awful connectivity in remote places (well, not even that remote for me) is what so many GUI apps undervalue, and I don't think the author of the article has ever thought of or encountered this. I loved TUIs back in the '80s and '90s when convention was so consistent across applications that muscle memory transferred seamlessly. Plus one could use a mouse to select menu options or the keyboard (like the many Microsoft programming environments like QuickBASIC, QuickC, Microsoft C as well as competitor products like Turbo Pascal and many others). The low bandwidth / high latency lossy link problem is still a major issue. Cell phone service is sufficiently shitty in the area I live in that I have to use mosh to get a usable remote connection many times a year. Mosh is also quite useful while travelling! Got a crappy connection on a train or airplane? No problem. I have so much muscle memory with the mutt email client that nothing else has ever come close. Where's the equivalent of mutt's limit command in Thunderbird? Try getting a usable VNC session when your cell phone hot spot is hitting 2-30 second ping times (yes -- thirty seconds) with only a handful of packets getting through. Version 2 of the Amiga's operating system did a great thing in version 2 of AmigaOS which explicitly spelled out what conventions to apply (see Amiga User Interface Style Guide at https://archive.org/details/amiga-user-interface-style-guide https://archive.org/details/amiga-user-interface-style-guide). Modern GUIs that have weird meaningless buttons are infuriating. Even moreso when they lack obvious keyboard shortcuts.
Linux-Fan 1mo ago
I use the terminal for most things which are not web browsing hence for me it makes sense to prefer TUIs for "lightweight" GUI needs. I love how I have to configure font size and family only once in the terminal emulator and not for each program/GUI toolkit again. Of course, there is no way to replace graphical-heavy programs (GIMP, QGIS etc.) with TUIs. <https://masysma.net/37/why_terminal.xhtml https://masysma.net/37/why_terminal.xhtml>
catlover76 1mo ago
[dead]