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Posted by rickcarlino 6 days ago

Why TUIs are back(wiki.alcidesfonseca.com)
422 points | 420 commentspage 8
debarshri 6 days ago|
It was always there. k9s for instance, it started getting noticed recently. With coding agents, it is even easier to build.
gorjusborg 6 days ago||
The real reason TUIs are back is not one reason, but a host of reasons.

The biggest current reason is fashion. Tools like Claude Code did it, and while they actually had good reasons to run in the terminal, the tools' popularity and wildly different look, especially to non-terminal-native users became a signal of some positive sort.

I don't believe that any of the rationale posed in the article is a popular reason developers are using.

onemoresoop 6 days ago|
Fashion is a big driver for sure but TUIs do have advantages over GUIs that are real, especially for powerusers.
matheusmoreira 6 days ago||
Terminals are great but they seem to be turning into literal browsers and it's starting to worry me.
Ekaros 6 days ago|
Just wait. Soon the terminal will be electron based. Showing electron running inside it somehow...
monkeydust 6 days ago||
Somewhat ironic is that people are using them to create generic web apps like they are going out of fashion.
j45 6 days ago||
They were never really gone, just maybe introduced to a new audience a little more lately which is great.
hebetude 6 days ago||
Some of us never switched to gui. Who wants to stop working to move a mouse around?
theanonymousone 6 days ago||
TUIs are extremely more portable, and offer a more uniform UX across platforms.
orbital-decay 6 days ago|
They are so portable that Windows needs a separate terminal emulator to be able to run *nix tooling properly.
paddy_m 6 days ago||
I think another factor is that people are rejecting the rounded corners and excessive padding of modern web design, you can't do that in a TUI, so you don't have a designer or standard practice encouraging you to do it. As implemented TUIs have greater information density than GUIs. Make no mistake though, TUIs are a decided step backwards from GUIs. Everything that you can express via text, you can also do in a text area on a GUI app.
aibudaev 6 days ago||
In any course, if the UI does not make any sense, the project should be failed.

Failing projects over bad UI teaches fear, not design. Good interfaces come from iteration and feedback - which is exactly what user-centered design is about

mirekrusin 6 days ago|
servo was recently published on crates – it has potential of becoming new standard; electron model proved to work very well the only downside is monstrous memory usage.
GoblinSlayer 6 days ago|
It's well known how it works. If web browser is efficient, it just invites webdevs to spend all the extra resources until it's slow again. Wait for AI assisted mouse cursor.
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