Building a TUI is easy now

Posted by abelanger 8 hours ago

96 points | 73 commentspage 3

verdverm 4 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 4 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

fragmede 4 hours ago||

The problem with TUI's, that we have all Stockholm syndrom'd ourselves, is that I can't use the mouse cursor to click to the position on the screen and edit the command line.

MisterTea 1 hour ago||

FWIW, Plan 9 windows work this way. They are just plain UTF-8 buffers with no typewriter emulation. You can edit any text you wish. If you want graphics, the draw device is a 2D graphics compositor you load assets into then issue rendering commands. Text is a draw primitive and easily displayed any way you want, angled, rotated, moving around, colorful. VT emulation is accomplished by vt(1) which does VT over stdio and emulates an ANSI typewriter using the draw device and it works well. You could even write a Plan 9 native TUI That way, just run it under vt(1). But I would not recommend that - go native.

willm 4 hours ago|||

It is possible. Terminals have supported mouse interactions for a long time.

fragmede 2 hours ago||

possible isn't the same as supported and working. A non-terminal hunt-and-peck typer sits down and is presented with a terminal, what's the second that happens when they're typing? they make a mistake and try to click on the word they misspelled, and it doesn't work.

HarHarVeryFunny 32 minutes ago|||

A terminal emulator in a GUI environment such as Linux is expected to play nice with the GUI and support mouse-based select, copy and paste, as well as being a terminal emulator, and this means that the terminal itself is consuming mouse events to support text selection.

If you wanted to write a shell that has mouse support you could certainly do so, and this would be based on sending escape codes to the terminal to tell it to return mouse events as input rather than let the terminal consume them itself. The shell could then itself support the clipboard if it wanted to, as well as support mouse editing.

I just googled it, and apparently "fish shell" does exactly this, but your hypothetical user is more likely to stumble upon a bash shell which is letting the terminal emulator consume the mouse events and support copy and paste.

hnlmorg 2 hours ago|||

That’s a very specific gripe to make. So specific that you have to acknowledge it’s not going to be a deal breaker for everyone. Which makes me wonder why you’d use the “Stockholm Syndrome” argument — assuming you used it in good faith and not just because you wanted to sound edgy (or some approximate synonym of)

baq 4 hours ago|||

I’ve built textual tuis (as in the Python library) and it responds to clicks just fine.

verdverm 4 hours ago||

You can use the mouse with TUIs build on the Charm stack

https://github.com/lrstanley/bubblezone

There are a lot of components that resemble things you find in web component libraries

themafia 3 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.

its_magic 4 hours ago||

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