Comment by perlgeek
7 hours ago
I agree with basically everything you've said, but I'd add that I sometimes wish we had a way to sometimes pop up a GUI for very specific tasks.
For example, enabling a fast multi-select of rows in a longish table (or even worse, a tree) is one of the tasks that TUIs don't really excel at. Popping up a PDF or image viewer would also be great.
The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and is accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.
Yeah, everything that couldn't be done through the TUI was a shitty web app, or worse, an iPad app. Fortunately those tasks were far less common and mostly dealt with the meta processes like searching national inventory, special corporate account data, things like that. All the day to day was in the TUI
There is no reason a TUI couldn't do this. Calling another program is easier in a TUI, since it is one step nearer to execve and a shell. If it is in a file, then opening another program isn't hard.
> The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and is accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.
Run another Linux VM on the client. /s
Aren't there X servers for Windows? I remembered installing one on a locked down university computer for fun.