Stop Making TUIs - Hacker News

Posted by underdeserver 1 day ago

Stop Making TUIs(sockpuppet.org)

377 points | 493 commentspage 9

refsab 9 hours ago|

I think I'll keep making TUIs but thanks.

Easier to test too. Try testing your beautiful claude design React app end to end

enthus1ast_ 9 hours ago||

From tui i can copy (all) text and run it over ssh, only a good image protocol is missing for me

beardedwizard 7 hours ago||

But TUIs make me feel smart, and my work feel important and esoteric.

sgt 8 hours ago||

Oh dear, the comments here are a bit disturbing and hilarious. The "Linux" mindset simply does not comprehend that proper UI's can still be made. Maybe that also includes the Windows mindset these days. Most of us macOS users never rejected TUI's, but we always had world class GUI's.

sochowski 1 day ago||

> But there’s one of the problems with TUIs: even with a good framework, like Ratatui, Textual, or Bubbletea, you’re fighting the terminal to come asymptotically close to what every native framework does well out of the box. Scrolling and scroll targets are an obvious example.

maybe the answer is... you just don't need features like scrolling? this guy is trying to fit a square peg into a circle hole

rvz 15 hours ago|

The entire article is close to rage bait and should be dismissed as such.

swader999 14 hours ago||

It's interesting going to order auto parts or construction materials. All old tui like console programs if you look at what they use. They are good and quick at them too.

trollbridge 5 hours ago||

LLM agent harnesses make it possible to do: CLI, TUI, REST API, web front end + Electron, native (I do macOS first, which then makes iOS/iPadOS almost trivial, followed by Android), and if I’m feeling ambitious, Windows (native) and Linux (usually Qt).

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.

ngvrnd 9 hours ago||

user interfaces are for users. people who deal with words may prefer an advanced TUI. Others may find graphical interfaces more useful. describe, don't prescribe. let a thousand flowers bloom.

avmich 12 hours ago||

TUIs are good for users, because they don't require using mouse as much - I didn't see this argument covered.

curtisblaine 1 day ago|

Clickbaity title. Boring show off of vibe coded apps that only make sense to the author, disguised as think piece. This post has it all.

jbstack 16 hours ago|

I found most of the article completely unreadable. I was actually beginning to wonder if the HN post had linked to the wrong article, as it had nothing to do with TUIs until the very end. It was just a long list of "look at this slop code I made" and "look, here's another one!".

rvz 15 hours ago|||

The whole article reads as a post around jealously on the popularity of TUIs and writes a pseudo-intellectual rant about them.

While I don't use most of them, but I can see why TUIs they are popular around devs. But in this post it reads like this:

"I don't like slop TUIs because they are popular, but please look at my vibe coded slop GUIs and I like vibe coding them and you should too"

One of the worst, if not part of my top ten worst blog posts I have ever seen on this orange site and absolutely do not listen to that horrible take that the author just wrote.

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