Comment by pragmatic

6 months ago

TUIs sucked and they still suck.

Programmers are trying to bring them back bc nostalgia I guess?

I floated the idea of TUIs to our data engineering team and got very negative responses. (My nostalgia for undergrad turbo pascal TUI I guess lol)

9 comments

pragmatic

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1313ed01  6 months ago

They are undeniably programmer-friendly though, no matter how hated by users. Much easier to do things when you are limited to just a grid of fixed size characters rather than the bizarre complexities of modern GUIs.

loloquwowndueo  6 months ago

Care to elaborate as to why they suck?

  • bob1029  6 months ago

    It's not that TUIs suck in terms of their inherent capabilities. It's that they're generally a miserable tool for the job, especially if it's a big one.

    TUIs are like shovels. A perfectly rational tool for doing a little bit of digging. Visual Studio 2022 is like Bagger 293.

dardeaup  6 months ago

Some do and some don't. Have you ever used any to develop an application?

I suppose a lot of it is also relative. When I started with TUIs decades ago, we didn't have too many options. Turbo Pascal 5.5 or 6.0 was extremely nice to use back in the day.

realharo  6 months ago

I think TUIs mostly suck for IDEs, but some tools like k9s or htop are nice.

  • tstenner  6 months ago

    Even k9s would profit enormously from detachable dialogs. Just let me do something without losing my current log view.