Posted by mustaphah 5 days ago
Yeah, they were great in 80s where HW was seriously underpowered. I run minimal IceWM and it looks and works great, and its quick :)
Maybe so...and, yes, somewhat it is utilizing lightweight options...however, more and more, i am using either bare GUIs or legit TUIs for less distraction...a sort of minimalism. I'd like to think that i could be super productive only using TUIs, because it might make me feel like some cool elite hacker...but i know that's not the case always. However, more and more I'm recently gravitating towards TUIs, or at least more minimal GUIs, for the semi-forced focus. I'm learning about myself more and more, and more buttons is not great.
Small example: my favorite GUI text editor is Kate (from KDE). i know it has bells and whistles, but since i keep things to a minimum, it sort of stays out of my way, and helps me write more - both prose and code, etc. What i have noticed over the decades of my usage of software is that for some areas - like writing - if i use more comprehensive tools - say, like VSCode - then i will keep playing with so many settings, and stuff gets in my way; i inadvertantly let myself get too distracted from getting stuff done. On the TUI side, i can use VIM, nano, micro, etc.and I'm quite productive as well. At least, that's what works for me. So, what you might call backwards, might be more like coming full circle for the productivity aspect, at least in ways that make sense for some people, not all of course. :-)
Most of my tools are TUI really, because its much esier to develop. Code reusability is huge. You wrote some nice interactive TList class? Cool, you can reuse it easly in other TUI projects.
Today world is a bit multitasking, so having TUI based Desktop is very limiting imo. Yeah, distractions.. Thats I think personal thing. I run old OS with 4 virtual desktops because one desktop is not really enough. Desktop 1 is generic. Desktop 2 is work. Desktop 3 is usually some Network Simulations I do. Desktop 2 and 3 usually have their own Xserver running, displaying stuff from remote servers. So, leaving GUI is not an option. Just use it smartly :)
And yeah, I use ViM ether in terminal or gViM (native Win32).
Excellent point; that is pretty hardcore! :-)
> ...I run old OS with 4 virtual desktops...
This is quite interesting, because i know a few acquaintences and friends who also use this approach of several desktops (each maybe with a dedicated app for example) to help them get really focused and productive! It seems to work for them really well...but i've never been able to have it click for me. I mean, i get the idea, and it sounds good...but for some reason it doesn't give me what i need...or, well, maybe its "out of sight, out of mind"...and then i forget about those other screens/desktops, etc. Of course, the possibility could absolutely be that i'm simply "holding it wrong"/using this approach in the wrong/less ideal way. :-)
TUIs are fine if they mean better thought-out command line interfaces, but I can't see the sense in then if they actively try to recreate GUIs.
I can imagine multiple use cases...
* A complete multiwindow console environment you can access locally or over an SSH session
* An extremely low-resource multi-app session for very low-end devices, such as a Raspberry Pi Zero or the like, where you have under a gigabyte of RAM
* A very fast very low-resource environment for a console-only server that happens to have a big hi-res LCD attached
* I am less sure but this could potentially be highly accessible for users with low vision or users of screenreaders.