More TUIs, and with eye candies too! :)

Since I wrote my own terminal multiplexer that puts terminals on infinite zoomable canvas [0] and I just can't get enough of putting weird stuff like asciiquarium, cmatrix or tty-clock all around (tried peaclock but it's slightly too fiddly for my taste). There are fun projects just to run in TUIs like astroterm or weathr, but I'd say that the space is still open to terminal toys.

The only problem I have with TUIs is that they're boring after a while but something that can be solved with often theme switching.

[0]: https://race-term.com (commercial)

Stop telling people what to do :/

Let people enjoy things.

One point for TUIs I haven't seen mentioned: they're faster for coding agents to iterate on. No need for screenshots or computer use. Agents have made GUIs cheap, but have made TUIs even cheaper, both to build and verify.

Just like MCP is for Desktop users and useless otherwise -- GUIs are a solution to a created problem.. of users not being able to read and write very well because they don't practice.

Terminal, coding, and even prompt writing skills are language skills.

If you cannot use a terminal properly you are basically an appliance user. Like a toaster operator.

TUIs are not for everyone by design.

Stop making TUIs, stop making GUIs, and make more CLIs. Claude can read the help text and efficiently drive it directly, without needing a vision model in the loop. Then I can go outside and do more something more interesting while Claude plays computers without me.

Tbh in a time where more and more applications are shipped as vibecoded electron based bloated bug-collections that are slow and take stupid amounts of resources i'd rather have even more TUI's than less.....

If you want to live only in the terminal, you can also use one of the text-based browsers [1] instead of Chrome, Firefox, etc. browsh [2] can also play YouTube videos if you'd like.

You can also just use the system console with tmux or GNU screen if you absolutely don't want any graphics at all.

The TUI programs usually do not consume a lot of resources. They are also very fast and optimized for keyboard-only navigation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_web_browser [2] https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh

TUIs are just an accessibility nightmare without any of the advantages of a CLI like scriptability. Truly, Truly horrible

Hot take: Too many people are building GUIs for what should just be a TUI, and vice versa

My stances:

- Dev tools need a CLI at minimum, TUI for complexity

- User facing needs a GUI, CLI for power users

If you're building a TUI for a user facing thing, then yeah, you're doing it wrong, but if your target audience is devs then yes, PLEASE do a TUI, and make it nice.

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.