Comment by lazyfanatic42

13 hours ago

What is with this wave of Text User Interface applications everywhere; and why does dev go through this type of cycle so often? Is it just new gen type behavior, so around 2030 we'll see a new wave of whatever and whatever?

I refuse to be old man who yells at clouds, but I think just like the new gen can't help what comes, neither can I. I just feel so old sometimes because most of the "new ideas" aren't really at all; they just have a different language to describe the same thing.

Lots of language have pretty good tools for making TUIs.

There's a good ratio between the time it takes to implement a TUI and its usefulness.

Writing a GUI with equivalent functionality would typically be a lot more work, with no gains at all. Er, except maybe touchscreen and touch-gesture support, none of which would add any value for this kind of tool.

  • > Writing a GUI with equivalent functionality would typically be a lot more work, with no gains at all.

    I disagree. Have you used something like tkinter? It's ridiculously easy to build GUIs. The trouble is if you build a GUI that way it will look kinda beige/crap whereas a TUI looks retro (but looks even worse to non-nerds).

I personally love the trend. TUIs are a great way to make a cross platform tools without much friction, and they are a pleasure to use.

TUI is my favourite on a computer (well, after CLI but... you know).

I want a GUI when I don't have a keyboard, typically on my mobile phone.

No one ever said TUIs are a new thing. It's been there since the beginning, when programs explicitly ran on terminals before WWW took off. It's the bloated web which ruined a lot of things