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Comment by bfkwlfkjf

16 hours ago

What a coincidence, I just discovered this tool yesterday. It made me really happy how a tool so simple makes such a huge difference in terms of how smooth it is to solve a problem, compared eg with using bluetoothctl.

It also occurred to me that there's a real value to tuis vs guis which is that since they're simpler to build with the same developer effort you can build more tools. I remember the dwarf fortress guys saying this in their interview, that they had at some point a similar game to DF but in 3d, but at some point they realized that by not wasting effort building the graphics part of the game they saved time to focus on what mattered.

If I have one tiny criticism about bluetui is the annoying fonts. I understand what they're trying to do: with more glyphs you can increase the density of information. But the thing is it's not really necessary in this case. Like someone else commented, there's plenty of white space. I know to some people it feels like eye candy, but to me the emojis sprinkled in the text are an eye sore.

12 comments

bfkwlfkjf

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pythops  16 hours ago

bluetui author here.

> It made me really happy how a tool so simple makes such a huge difference in terms of how smooth it is to solve a problem,

Happy to hear that :)

> if I have one tiny criticism about bluetui is the annoying fonts

You suggest to get rid of the icons ? what if they can be disabled in the config, will that fix the issue for you ?

> there's plenty of white space You can set the window width from the config file (width = positive integer) if you don't want the TUI to be responsive.

  • PostOnce  14 hours ago

    I think the icons are cool.

    Emoji in text is annoying, but this isn't a page of text, it's a UI element, and that can make something clear especially if you're connecting a device whose name is unknown, but you know it's a speaker, or whatever.

    So having the option to enable / disable is better than taking away the icons, in my opinion.

    • alias_neo  13 hours ago

      Absolutely this. Particularly when there might be a few unnamed devices, but you know your devices is a particular device class, you can guesstimate the correct device based on its class, and the icon is extremely useful for this!

  • jorvi  10 hours ago

    > You suggest to get rid of the icons ? what if they can be disabled in the config, will that fix the issue for you ?

    Yes.

    In general, its a good idea to not rely on someone having installed nerdfonts / fonts with glyphs. Or at the very least offer fallback.

    You can usually get pretty far by repurposing Unicode symbols.

    For example, from Bamum:

      𖦤 Headphone
  𖦥 IEM
  𖤣 Mic
  ꚰ Warning
  𖥉 Bluetooth (had to get a little creative)

    • dspillett  9 hours ago

      That method isn't entirely reliable either: all come out at “question mark in a box” (Chrome, Edge) or “codepoint hex in box” (FF) on the old Win10 box that I'm currently trying to retire. The come out find on a similarly default Win11 setup.

      While the issue here is Win10, it shows that the problem is client font sensitive so it might affect others too (perhaps those running old-but-still-supported Linux distro releases with default fonts).

      2 replies →

    • yjftsjthsd-h  8 hours ago

      > In general, its a good idea to not rely on someone having installed nerdfonts / fonts with glyphs. Or at the very least offer fallback.

      This bears emphasis; I sometimes use tools that try to use fancy fonts for icons, and it just gives me unreadable symbols because I don't have the font installed. And you might reasonably say, "just install the font package", but that only works if the font is packaged for my system, and I know what package it's in.

    • Ontonator  9 hours ago

      For Bluetooth, you could of course use one or both of the runes upon which the logo was based: ᛡᛒ

  • jxdxbx  12 hours ago

    Hi bluetui author. I just discovered your app last week, just wanted to say it is great.

    I truly like this new generation of command line utils (I have bat, eza, etc aliased to things like cat and ls) and TUIs like yours. TUIs in particular: having grown up with DOS apps, then graduating to using Pine for email on a shell account, they are nostalgic, but also just super fast and practical. And I like having an option in between the command line and config files and a full-blown GUI app (which, on Linux, might look like any old random thing anyway).

  • bfkwlfkjf  13 hours ago

    > what if they can be disabled in the config, will that fix the issue for you ?

    I mean if you're offering, I would love that.

    And thank you for releasing under GPL. <3