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Posted by rickcarlino 7 days ago

Why TUIs are back(wiki.alcidesfonseca.com)
422 points | 420 commentspage 10
Gud 6 days ago|
Were they gone?
nharada 6 days ago||
VB6 was the peak of desktop GUI app development change my mind
timbit42 5 days ago|
Delphi.
te_chris 6 days ago||
Why am I back on the terminal and 40k lines deep in my own ai-workflow tui? Two reasons: 1) AI writes my dotfiles. It fucking rules. 2) charm bracelet tui ecosystem in go is ace and ai writes it well.
pjmlp 6 days ago||
Because now we have a young generation nostalgic of their parents experience in the 1980-90's, and that includes the TUI experiences we were stuck with back in the day.
beej71 7 days ago||
The best thing about TUIs is that they're so fast. They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast. There's a learning curve for the bazillion hotkeys, because all it is is hot keys, but when you have it, you just fly.

I've been reverting more and more: mutt (mail), newsboat (RSS), amfora (gemini protocol), gurk (Signal), chawan (web), and even trn (Usenet). My RAM usage is tiny. Everything is quick.

GUIs should take a page from the TUI playbook and consider making the app keyboard-first. Nothing is more frustrating than a missing hotkey.

PunchyHamster 6 days ago||
GUIs are being developed for first 30 minutes of use.

It seems that barely anyone thinks about what GUI should like for app you use hours at a time for days at end.

About only software that's half decent for it are IDEs (and probably some industry-specific niche software I'm ignorant of)

breuleux 7 days ago|||
> They launch fast, run fast, and you use them fast.

I don't know about that. The Gemini TUI takes like four full seconds to start on my machine. I have no idea what the hell it's doing. A lot of the fancy new TUIs that are coming on the crest of the current fad are hot garbage. I hate them.

beej71 6 days ago||
Claude Code is 600 Kloc... insanity. It's definitely possible to write crap TUIs.
fg137 7 days ago||
Eh... no. Never underestimate people's ability to make software bloated and slow. You haven't spent enough time with Claude Code, Gemini CLI I guess.
beej71 7 days ago||
Oh, I've definitely seen the results. :) But it's nice when people don't do that.
krelas 7 days ago||
Hate to be this guy but it’s Xerox PARC, not Park.
furyofantares 6 days ago|
That and "loosing", but I gotta admit, I suddenly love typos and mistakes like this letting me quickly know the post wasn't fed through an LLM.
alcidesfonseca 6 days ago||
Fixed both issues. Thanks!
dzonga 6 days ago||
ahh the classic - see one anecdote - then create a narrative that the world is changing.

if TUIs were truly back - as DHH would like you to believe - his money maker - Basecamp - would be available as a TUI, Salesforce, Workday, Bloomberg etc would be available as TUIs. Though Bloomberg is the closest to a TUI.

but let's continue to delude ourselves.

mert-kurttutan 6 days ago|
Yeah. I expected article to give much more thorough analysis and set of observations and trends. As far as the actual observation of popularity of TUI, the only relevant part is claude and codex. The rest is about his personal opinion of TUI (vs other UIs)

Nobody here (especially top comments) seems to mention this.

Very low on the actual information side.

personjerry 7 days ago||
> TUIs are Back

Citation needed?

jimmypk 6 days ago||
[dead]
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