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Comment by userbinator

16 hours ago

I've absolutely had it with shit "designer" UIs hiding useful information and leaving a sea of useless space instead. There's nothing "nicer" about making users go through more effort.

That has nothing to do with this author and everything to do with you.

  • Zero attempt to answer my original question. Looks like I've stepped into another pit of toxic positivity here.

Have you thought that you may want the window for this to be super small and that whitespace you see no longer exists?

  • Adapt based on window size? Either hide/truncate less essential information when the width goes below a threshold, or make each entry multi-line if you require showing all of it. This is not exactly a new approach, I can resize my Foobar2000 window and the playlist columns will stay proportional to the window, and that seems to be using fairly standard windows components to the extent it wouldn't look out of place 30 years ago.

It's a plague under TUI go software too made with Bubbletea. Also, with some mesh related interfaces written in Python. Both slow and with a shitty interface not properly working under an 80x24 terminal with 16 colours.

I remember some hipster fauxretro player with just some playlist made of m3u links, written in Go. The visualization animations made it unusable under my n270 CPU based netbook. Meanwhile, the playlist URL's from the code played perfectly well under mocp with a really low CPU usage. Oh, you want bells and whistles? I think the Cava terminal visualizer can work with MPD and plug any CLI/TUI client you like.

  • Hardcoding any color than base16 is usually a poor choice. It should be up to the user to use any other color.

    And colors should be semantic. If you don’t have any theming ability, just use reverse video to indicate selected state.

    My current pet peeve is cli tools using ansi codes for progress bar. And with very poor detection of terminals.

    • For curseradio under OpenBSD, I just replaced bold for reverse in the Python code for the selected and/or highlighted radio station. It works much better this way.

  • The whole ecosystem of charm tools are well made. But most of them are extremely bloated and requires tons of dependencies to build a TUI