Comment by lucideer
2 days ago
Apart from the apparent comparative ease of creation relative to GUIs (I suspect Electron apps may be easier than TUIs), I think the main benefits from a user perspective seems to be down to cultural factors & convention:
- TUIs tend to be faster & easier to use for cli users than GUI apps: you get the discoverability of GUI without the bloated extras you don't need, the mouse-heavy interaction patterns & the latency.
- keybindings are consistent & predictable across apps: once you know one you're comfortable everywhere. GUI apps are highly inconsistent here if they even have keybindings
- the more limited widget options brings more consistency - GUI widgets can be all sorts of unpredictable exotic
- anecdotally they just seem higher quality
For that matter, with modern terminals, you can still do mouse interactivity as an option. I think that working over an SSH terminal is pretty nice in and of itself even if you can self-host a web application.
I've almost always got my terminal app open anyway, in the case of VS Code, I don't even need to switch to another app to use it.