GUI apps are only platform independent if you(r framework) make them so.
It's a quite common illusion that TUI apps are "automatically" platform independent. Even knowing which terminal emulator intercepts which shortcuts and how they handle width change, control character, mouse events, images, etc and design around them is not a trivial task.
On the other hand, making platform independent GUI apps haven't been easier. Just use Electron. Yes, performance blahblah, but thousands of Electron apps work on millions of machines just fine.
The only one I use is Copilot (inside of a VM). ALl other applications I use are GUI/CLI/webapps.
- yazi as a file explorer
- lazygit for git
- tmux/zellij as multiplexers
- fzf left and right for a bunch of utils (terminal history, switching between projects in zellij/tmux when working in multi-project workspaces, etc)
- neovim as a text editor
- glow for markdown reading
- currently on pi for my home harness, CC at work
Please, make more TUIs and web apps, so they can live in my terminal or my browser.
Once you get the key bindings for screen or tmux thoroughly memorized it's very easy.
I have a windows box that never shuts down and i remote into it and use it GUI mode to do everything you said but with a proper GUI interface. I also use the terminal but your feature (constantly up + resume + multi device) does not need TUIs to even work.
While a mouse can theoretically use all pixels of a screen, in practical terms a keyboard has a much larger input space than a mouse, and if I can keep both my hands on the keyboard, I can work a lot faster.
At least that's my experience as a (starting) greybeard.
And you present the division of this simple unification of modalities as a benefit, but don't explain why it ought be many.
So far it's all just preference.
I'm not going to deny that the terminal has a ramp, is a lifelong learning curve. But I personally find it much more earnest, much closer to what is really happening, with less intermediation, and the way that terminal conposes with other things is usually unbeatable. TUI for humans, jsonl event sourcing for machine-to-machine.
> drawing on a couple of decades of established UX conventions for how they are displayed
I tend to not just click random apps open. I tend to have done some research and found what options there are on my own. I tend to know what I'm looking for, by the time I'm going to run something. In terms of getting there, finding stuff: the best convention I know of is aptitude, and dselect before it. Both very fine very old tui systems, and clear cuts above any app or web store, imo, for its power, directness, clarity, intent, and script ability.
But with a worse UX?
As a devils advocate in response to all the comments claiming TUIs are fine, maybe consider TUIs mostly do not come with many of the advantages of using a terminal CLI app - you can't pipe data into them, out of them, spawn them and collect the output, etc like you can with the usual stuff you run in a terminal.
IOW, they are a reduced functionality of a GUI - resizing works poorly, scrolling works poorly, UI affordances are poor (sure, you can grey out a button, but drag-n-drop hardly ever works between your various terminal tabs, and the smallest UI element is a full character block, unlike a GUI where you can have indicators that are smaller than a character, mini-windows, etc), lack of widgets, etc.
The lightweight argument is not so good either - look at Claude Code, after all. If you want lightweight GUIs, you can do that too.
The only argument that stands is the ssh one, but if working via a remote connection, I'm not going to want a full functionality application anyway - why would I prefer a wordstar/wordperfect interface to a complex document over a GUI interface? For simple documents, sure, TUI all the way, but when I have multiple panes (outline, minimap, status bars, toolbars, etc), it performs poorly in a TUI.
TUIs are making a resurgence, sure, but only in the context of developers and development.
So you can't even immediately switch to your app and don't see it in an OS-integrated list?
Terminals are great for CLI. CLI integrated into GUI/TUI is absolutely amazing, but 99% TUI apps do not work like that, they're just awkward crutches foreign to the terminal, so you get no upsides and all downsides. Examples of good CLI integration I regularly use: Kate, Zed, Dolphin, Total Commander, pi. Only one of them is TUI, and honestly it's much worse off with it, since it has to display a ton of formatted text and sometimes pictures. It's really inconvenient and just looks like cargo cult rather than a necessity.
Native UIs simply don't have the same flexibility.
Edit to add: I didn't bring my laptop; I'm working from Termux. Surprisingly effective! The code is all in a folder syncing with my phone via SyncThing, so I can try out the sites I'm working on directly on the phone.
My reaction to this is basically about the same as the fictional Ivan Chesnokov
(beware, crude language, profanity, etc)
But then a load of others will complain about electron apps.
Further you then have an os within an os. You need to remember to look in your bookmarks, not your start menu. And you're basically throwing away the window manager too.
I want to run web apps in my browser. I understand why Signal isn't a web app, and I'm willing to put up with that for security, but nobody else gets that excuse. Web apps belong in a browser tab.
It’s much easier for the clanker to loop on testing / improving the TUI than a real GUI. It also means it can work on the app without an API/REST/HTTP/Java/Script ball of mud in the middle.
I salute you, heros.
There are real advantages of TUIs: less CPU; sometimes I want to be using a personal TUI on a personal dev server quickly from a work laptop at lunchtime and an ssh + tmux + TUI is perfect; most modern TUI libraries are significantly less painful to work with than most modern web app frontend libraries; I can change the font size of my terminal easily if I need to, more easily than native (but not web app). But by far the biggest, is they just generally tend to be very fast and responsive compared to everything else.
While I get your point, a lot of vibe-coded agent TUIs (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, …) aren't exactly fast, either.
Now it’s “native apps for 5 platforms done almost for free” era for anyone who cares.
See Meta’s new AI desktop app (no, I won’t install anything from Zuck on my computer, but I appreciate what they did).
Can you elaborate?
- I'm team GUI! The author outline elegantly why. Sometimes I put command-line-like things in the GUI; I generally view it as a superset of CLI, with vastly richer capabilities. This is kind of interesting in the bioinformatics/structural bio space, which I feel is inherently visual, and benefits from 2d layouts. Most of the tools are CLI and based in I/O of stdout and text-based files. I am taking a different direction!
> Back in 1999, Neal Stephenson wrote an essay about command line interfaces that set the field of human-computer interaction back about 20 years. In it, he depicts the priesthood of Unix nerds wielding CLIs as powerful Morlocks, holding the entire computing industry on their shoulders. The Eloi use GUIs like Microsoft Word. Because this is high-test fan-service, “In The Beginning Was The Command Line” has become one of our field’s sacred texts, despite very little of it holding up 25 years later.
We should not take Sci-Fi and creative plot devices as predictions for the future. They can be inspirations and motivations for your own creativity, if tempered by realistic expectations and discipline. Neal Stephenson is especially prescient (Certain concepts from Fall; or Dodge in Hell and Anathem are hitting home strongly right now!). He spins vibrant, speculative yarns, mixing concepts, and estimating trajectories. The story referenced he is one that's in particular easy to see what parts did and didn't pan out. (And what Neal's more recent reflections on it say)
I think there is a bit of cultural identity (Which we are genetically inclined to insert in all sorts of places!) going on. There is a certain cyberpunk fun in SSHing a terminal, pipeling stdout/in together, and Viming. I suspect there is a high overlap between people for whom Linux is part of their identity, TUI use is as well. I.e, it's not about a practical weighing of merits; standard identity/tribal-based choices.
FOr use of TUI as a general file browser/command-executor... I've made my own. It's a GUI, and has built-in terminal for executing commands, with a visual file browser. And most importantly: Shortcuts to execute commonly-used workflows, history, bookmarks etc. All of which I feel like are glaring things missing from standard terminals. (PS, Bash etc). And having a terminal as one part of a multi-window program feels like a good use of my screen space!
I’m with Tom on a lot of what he says. This is a nice reminder to take another shot at this.