Stop Making TUIs: Native UI is now easier than terminal apps

Three broad notes:

- I'm team GUI! The author outline elegantly why. Sometimes I put command-line-like things in the GUI; I generally view it as a superset of CLI, with vastly richer capabilities. This is kind of interesting in the bioinformatics/structural bio space, which I feel is inherently visual, and benefits from 2d layouts. Most of the tools are CLI and based in I/O of stdout and text-based files. I am taking a different direction!

> Back in 1999, Neal Stephenson wrote an essay about command line interfaces that set the field of human-computer interaction back about 20 years. In it, he depicts the priesthood of Unix nerds wielding CLIs as powerful Morlocks, holding the entire computing industry on their shoulders. The Eloi use GUIs like Microsoft Word. Because this is high-test fan-service, “In The Beginning Was The Command Line” has become one of our field’s sacred texts, despite very little of it holding up 25 years later.

We should not take Sci-Fi and creative plot devices as predictions for the future. They can be inspirations and motivations for your own creativity, if tempered by realistic expectations and discipline. Neal Stephenson is especially prescient (Certain concepts from Fall; or Dodge in Hell and Anathem are hitting home strongly right now!). He spins vibrant, speculative yarns, mixing concepts, and estimating trajectories. The story referenced he is one that's in particular easy to see what parts did and didn't pan out. (And what Neal's more recent re […]

Counter proposal: stop making gui, ONLY make TUI.

+ seamless cli integration

+ network portable

+ graphics (!!) with modern emulators

+ always themable

+ scriptable

+ works with any navigation modality

+ you can copy & paste entire segments of your window easily

+ easy to consistently theme

+ did i mention entirely network/os transparent?

+ blazing fast

tongue-in-cheeck mostly, but i assure tfa, the tui serves useful functions. i spend >80% of my time in terminal, and having a pane to do some task a gui would otherwise be needed for is a sheer blessing. being able to essentially move my session to a laptop is wonderful. no mucking with screen sizes or weird X11 wonkery (if you still use x11). what would blow my socks clean off is a tui/gui+gui/tui backend pair so we can have our tui and you can gui it tooie.

No, thanks. I don't want a mere "user" interface, I want a programmer's interface. I don't like the command line because I'm a "unix nerd", I like it because it lets me rapidly cook up little programs and execute them.

Here's an example I just pulled out of my shell history:

c=3afba1a; reset; laptop "virtdev ssh liblinux -- git -C liblinux format-patch -1 ${c} --stdout" | tee /dev/tty | termux-clipboard-set

This huge oneliner clears the screen, logs into my laptop via ssh, then logs into my development virtual machine, then generates a patch from the specified commit, and this data gets piped into my Termux terminal and my phone's clipboard. Then I paste it into the ChatGPT app for code review.

I didn't need to think to write this, I just wrote it right there in the terminal using the shell's line editor, just because I needed it, and it completely solved my problem. It's as easy as pressing up on keyboard now, and I can easily turn it into a script if needed. Nobody had to bend over backwards to add monstruous features to the apps to accomodate me. I knew what my computer needed to do, and I made it do it.

In my opinion we need more of this, not less. More unix and less iphones.

Tabs vs spaces.

I’ve always appreciated the positive side of TUIs and appreciated less the positive side of GUIs. I didn’t grow up with a computer at all and in one of my first adult jobs I had to use a TUI at Papa John’s for punching in orders, it was 20x faster than anything I used after it at other restaurants that were GUI driven (keyboard speed wins for me, fit my brain perfectly). I think I learned it in 5 minutes. I was just a normy trying to pay bills.

I dunno why we gotta be insulting to people’s preferences, the article is genuinely bad about this.

> Stop Making TUIs

No, I don't think I will :)

It's great for admin tools, alongside CLIs.

It's portable, it's fast, it's discoverable, it has zero bullshit effects, it's as secure as my shell, it's efficient.

And what is this point about agents making it easy to generate GUIs ? They are equally good (if not better) at generating TUIs using any of the great frameworks for this.

> I’m not packaging this application up. If you want it, just screenshot this section of the post and give it to Claude. It’ll build something useful. You see where I’m going with this.

This pretense that the entire value of source code is the "spec" / "requirement" is alarming.

The value of the code is how well-formed the spec is + how well tested it is in the real world. So prompt / mockup cannot replace code.

Sorry, no.

I don't want to forward a whole desktop environment just because I want to use a small application I have written for myself.

TUIs are much more portable, easier on eyes, can be information dense, and resistant to lassiez-faire UI library changes on platforms. They don't need GPUs to render, megabytes of RAM to run, great amounts of bandwidth to access from afar.

I'll write a library for the functionality, and will slap a TUI on top. You want a GUI, write it yourself. Everything is GPLv3 licensed. You can do whatever you want as long as you respect the license.

One of the biggest upsides of TUIs over GUIs is that I can run any number of TUI instances.

Meanwhile a GUI's developer has to decide to grace me with the ability to even open more than one window. "A tabbed interface will be sufficient!" -- yay, I'll never be able to view two screens of info at the same time.

Just like MCP is for Desktop users and useless otherwise -- it's a solution to a created problem of users not being able to read and write very well.

Terminal, coding, and even prompt writing skills are language skills.

If you cannot use a terminal properly you are basically an appliance user. Like a toaster operator.

TUIs are not for everyone by design.