I understand the point the article's making, and in fact, I believe it's a good one. Ultimately I continue to prefer TUIs over GUIs for one reason: Practically nobody will target TUIs for advertisements, doom scroll content, AI slop, any kind of marketing, etc.

> I’m not packaging this application up. If you want it, just screenshot this section of the post and give it to Claude. It’ll build something useful. You see where I’m going with this.

Does anyone else find that this reflects a really obnoxious attitude, regardless of whether it would work?

Anyway, it seems like the premise is that people would only ever build a TUI because making a GUI was hard, and now it isn't because LLM slop will be good enough. But I'm firmly convinced that fails on both counts.

I've mentioned this before, but the rise of the TUI is the simply the systemic failure of remote GUIs.

The primary value statement of TUIs is that they work over SSH with remote systems.

But now, we're hearing rumbles about the limitations of the "modern" terminals with regards to working well with a "rich" TUI. How a raw tty doesn't really cut it since it, at a minimum, can't detect key presses, only actual character/byte patterns. How there needs to be a new protocol, a "better" terminal client.

Of course when you go that route, then the current terminal emulators will need to be updated, or you'll be required to install a different terminal emulator that supports the new protocol. But that kind of defeats the theoretical, historical ubiquity of a TUI. It would not surprise me that many modern TUIs only work with an ANSI terminal.

Back in the day, we had systems like Visual Basic, Power Builder, SQLWindows. GUI/language systems particularly well suited for Client/Server DB development.

For a time, Firefox actually presented itself as a modern incarnation of these tools. Using XUL and JS for UI development, built in utilities to talk back to servers over HTTP. It was a platform for "Rich Internet Applications(tm)".

It didn't really take off, it wasn't documented very well, kind of buggy. It also required Firefox as a client. The potential was there, but not quite realized. Ajax hit the web browser in full force and that pretty much was the last nail. Now, you could use "any" browser for more interactive applications.

Of course, we advance to today, where many sites work in any browser as long as its Chrome. We have advanced applications that are no more than a Canvas element, with everything else being reinvented from scratch. "Have bitblt, will travel."

The browser is the closest thing we have to a universal remote GUI, but we all know the issues with it for many contexts. As an application platform, it may be ubiquitous, but that doesn't mean it's at all lightweight.

We used to have lightweight, remote GUI applications. Rootless X Window applications. Folk don't necessarily want the entire desktop, they just want an app, with some fields and buttons. You could slap them together with TCL/TK. Remember dtksh? We're not talking about trying to write Adobe Premiere or AutoCAD in these things. We just want some simple utilities, fields, icons, maybe a chart. Scrolling tables and a menu.

But we can't do that today, not readily, not easily.

So, we're kicked back to 1978 and the rise of the Smart Terminal, instead of 1984 and the rise of the X Terminal.

If folks are going to write out a custom client for a TUI, then may as well go the extra 10 feet and make it a remote GUI client. Reinvent all of the wheels as they go round, and round again.

Isn’t the GUI version of a TUI just an Electron app?

Another trend is to bring graphical features into terminal emulators thanks to the initial protocol and implementation work in Kitty with the Kitty Graphics Protocol. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/

And now libghostty has caught up with a full implementation of the protocol in a second terminal emulator. I guess that mitchellh has plans for use in Superlogical... https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/117135178412268410

"But remember: I’m not really building applications for other people to use. I’m building them for me."

You are free to build anything you like, and whatever you build won't affect me at all.

Or, perhaps, stop making pomodoro apps, todo list apps with budgeting as their 'unique' killer feature, and damned Markdown viewers. Seriously.

Or, you know what, don't listen to strangers on internet telling you what you should do. Do what you want.

Do more TUIs.

People are unable to do good GUIs. The web shows this; completely disregarding any UI guidelines by web people established since 80s is a proof that most people have no idea how to make GUIs.

I don't know how to make a good GUI. That's why I need good templates and strong guidelines, discipline and spend long time on design. Most people don't do that.

TUI is much, much easier. It's also possible to do bad TUIs, but it's easier to do a good TUI than to do an average GUI.

What is the complaint in the article really about?

People write code using the platform X because they like it. It doesn't make sense to try to stop this