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Posted by abelanger 6 hours ago

Building a TUI is easy now(hatchet.run)
60 points | 53 commentspage 2
socalgal2 3 hours ago|
Do we want tuis?

I can’t stand Gemmin-CLI. That tui gets in the way constantly

I’m mixed in jj’s tui. It’s better than no ui tho

Mostly tho I’m curious when I’d want a tui. Most of the time in a terminal I don’t want one

2muchtime 2 hours ago||
I do.

I want my interfacing with computers to be mouseless and TUIs offer that. I don’t think I’ve run into a GUI, no matter how many hotkeys it has and I know, where I didn’t have to reach for the mouse.

CLI only also requires remembering commands, some of which I use very infrequently, thus need to look up every time I use them.

I think TUIs hold a very nice spot between GUIs and CLI.

verdverm 2 hours ago||
VS Code with the Vim extension is largely mouseless

I use the TUI from a terminal tab in VS Code, my agent works with that and the custom extension with a webapp based interface, seamlessly and concurrently

GUIs, TUIs, and PR/kanban all make sense in different situations. We'll all use at least two of them on regular basis for coding agents.

TUIs make way less sense for your average user

dualogy 1 hour ago||
> VS Code with the Vim extension is largely mouseless

It's also easily mouseless without any Vim or like extension. I never mouse in it, having given intuitive-to-me keychords to all the various moves I need to make beyond the standard stuff.

verdverm 1 hour ago||
true, I would never have moved over if I had to give up my vim bindings and modes
liveoneggs 2 hours ago|||
I just want a stream, not a TUI. If you can't | it it's not real
hnlmorg 1 hour ago||
There’s no reason why you can’t have both.

Well behaved CLI tools have for years already been changing their UX depending on whether STDOUT is a TTY or a pipe.

rirze 2 hours ago||
Have you tried jjui? It’s pretty nice
christophilus 2 hours ago||
There are plenty of great tools available these days. Bubbletea would be my tool of choice, I think:

https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

verdverm 2 hours ago|
Charm is what the post submission is using
tantalor 2 hours ago||
> most importantly, they live inline to your code, preventing constant tab switching

No idea what this means.

prydt 2 hours ago||
I think the implicit assumption here is that you are using a terminal-based code editor like neovim... which is not necessarily true.
oj-hn-dot-com 2 hours ago||
I think the reference is to all the TUI based coding tools now like opencode.
jgauth 3 hours ago||
Charm looks good. What is the TUI library of choice for python these days?
2muchtime 3 hours ago|
https://www.textualize.io/
empath75 2 hours ago||
I was working on a fairly niche thing, a library of crossplane compositions written in KCL and thought it would be nice to have a TUI so i could browse through them and see the rendered yaml as claude was working on it. I asked claude code to write it with python and textual and it one shotted it in about two minutes including a test suite.
keybored 2 hours ago||
Building an article is easy now.
emilfihlman 3 hours ago||
The thing with TUIs is that, using mobile native virtual keyboards, it's apparently quite impossible to make them behave in a sane way in browsers!

I think the only reasonable option seems to be reimplementing one yourself, which is massively stupid.

NetOpWibby 3 hours ago||
Mobile is not for TUI
bahmboo 3 hours ago|||
More specifically it's an interface designed for a physical keyboard. Or even more specifically it's designed for precise and easy human text input.
verdverm 2 hours ago||
especially where you typically type with all fingers instead of just your thumbs
emilfihlman 2 hours ago|||
Sure it is. I, and millions of others, use it all the time with for example Termux.
avaer 3 hours ago||
If you have a TUI the correct way to support mobile browsers is to 1-shot a React page equivalent. Trying to make the mobile keyboard work for this would be silly.
verdverm 2 hours ago||
Dagger has a really nice TUI built on Charm. It reads OTEL to create an interactive tree for your builds and containers. If you have cloud setup, it will also push that all to a webapp interface where you can share and navigate in perpetuity. This works for both CI and local runs, super cool for sharing links to failed builds during dev, even while the dev's local build is still running

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPEGTfaFnpA

fragmede 2 hours ago||
They are! I (well, Claude) built nitpick as a TUI HN client, and it was surprisingly easy to do.

https://github.com/fragmede/nitpick

themafia 2 hours ago|
"Creating garbage is easy now."

It runs poorly, loses keystrokes, and easily gets bogged down with too much terminal input.

I don't want candy coated monospace ASCII graphics. I want something fast and functional. The graphics are _entirely_ secondary. You've missed the point of what a TUI is.

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