I make some things GUIs and some things TUIs. The TUIs are easier to work with Claude Code and Codex. We can co-work on many things together because the LLM harness reads TUIs very fast. You can do it with GUIs but that's much slower, and maintaining two separate interfaces into these things isn't worth the trouble.

I spend all day in a terminal multiplexer (zellij) with neovim and other splits. Using things like k9s / btop / lazygit / lazydocker helm / stern / whatever that systemd TUI I saw in here and started and will check out later just keeps me focused in one window, and that’s pretty cool

I think most people are missing the forest for the trees.

TUIs are popular because once you use a piece of software that doesn't have a poorly-written GUI library full of animations bogging it down, you don't want to go back.

It's hard to make a TUI that isn't snappy, no matter how much useless eye-candy it has.

I think the come back is completely driven by Claude Code. Claude Code is a TUI, Claude Code is successful, therefore let's make everything a TUI!

I'm pretty sure the success has nothing to do with the TUI though. I personally enjoy it a lot but the productivity boast doesn't come from avoiding the mouse.

> Reviewing code is important, but it's only 50% of the learning process, at best

I don't know about everyone else, but the code I reviewed as a Junior was high quality code I was expected to learn from. That's entirely different from doing code review on whatever CC outputs.

I am conflicted on tuis they are nice, convenient and I dig the aestetic. But they're often not composeable. So even if they're there they dont feel native to the terminal. It is just an app in the terminal and that is okay, but you lose some of the terminal magic

Cuz they're cheap and people don't care. Same reason by electron interfaces are so common

The bottom of the post contains an interesting suggestion, for us software developers to read one of three 'basics' books on UI: "Nielsen, Norman or Johnson".

Can someone who is more knowledgeable about these help compare and contrast these three texts a bit?

My cynical take why TUIs are back is because people operating in the terminal became a signal that you were competent and once people figured that out everybody started doing it. The reason people were operating in the terminal is lost of them but hey it makes you look like a 1337 hacker. It's the same thing with side projects of past decades. People who had side projects cared about the craft for more than a paycheck and tended to be more competent. Then every person just trying to land a job suddenly had "side projects". Gotta have those green squares on github.