Comment by dwb

I disagree, I think TUIs are a great fit in some problem domains.

Think for instance the Debian package configuration dialogs -- they're far more comfortable than the same questions without a TUI, and still work over a serial console if you have to use one.

For tools like various kinds of "top", there's many potential tools you can use to the same end and intentionally using one that draws CPU graphs over one that just displays a number. Graphs are much easier to interpret than a column of numbers.

In many cases they're the optimal choice given some constraint -- like the desire to have minimal dependencies, working over SSH, and being usable without breaking the flow. Yeah, you could make a tunnel to a tool that runs a local webserver and delivers graphs by HTTP, but the ergonomics of that are terrible.

Here's why I use them: many modern graphical applications are extremely wasteful. TUIs are typically small, low footprint applications that don't come bundled with a browser or webview. I don't need yet another electron app for every little thing.

I don't think most GUIs expose any more structure than TUIs.

Yes, but this kind of dashboard was never going to be accessible anyway. It's a dense visual representation of vast system state with constant real-time fluctuation. Even in a browser, it would be hell to navigate the constantly changing state with a screen reader. And visually increasing the scale and contrast defeats the purpose of the density of the original display.

If you need to support screen readers, your UI would have to be totally different: You should allow the user to snapshot the system state and navigate it. Generate succinct summary text to impart the same sense that a dashboard would to a visual user. "Normal: All systems OK" "Critical: Boeing RPA servers down since 2:17PM PDT and 54 others". Once you've done this work, a CLI tool could expose this just as screen-readable:

    $ cli status
      all systems OK, last outage resolved 2:27 PDT

    $ cli topjob cpu
      117 Boeing RPA, 78% CPU
      434 SAIC PDM, 43% CPU

    $ cli downtime today 117
      Boeing RPA down 10 minutes today, resolved now

>I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad.

You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Case in point from Emacs/Vim and the Borland IDEs to Claude, plus all kinds of handy utils from mc and htop to mutt.

>They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely

That's not necessarily bad. Not everything has to be open ended.

What is great about them is the constraints they impose on the UI designer. I spend so much time finding actions in apps like Zed, Obsidian or Slack because menus and rows of buttons are not cool anymore.

I'd really want explicit UIs from 2000, but in the mean time TUIs feel like an improvement.

They are GUIs --- just minecraft GUIs. One day, we will rediscover why GUI toolkits exist. The only real advantage TUIs have over GUIs is easy remoting, TBH. Maybe that's enough for people. Otherwise? They're just hair shirts.

I like that they are integrated into the terminal and stay in the terminal. For most things my terminal multiplexer is essentially my tiling window manager and everything that breaks out of that via its own window is very unergonomic and breaks the structured logic of my workflow. Technically just having a full GUI inside the boundaries of a terminal would be fine for a lot of things. But it's also one of these things where constraints make a lot of things better. Many GUIs are just really bloated and bad. TUIs just do not allow a lot of the sins of modern GUIs.

I agree that they can get very clunky for non text based tasks or anything where you actually need custom text formating.

I think I see your point. I've had it in the back of my head too.

Guess it's like the separation between backend and front-end. When the logic is neatly wrapped in a nice API you can potentially get a lot of reusability from that since the API can be integrated into other things with other use cases.

But a TUI probably doesn't naturally come with a separate backend. However, if a cli is built in a non TUI way it is about as flexible as a backend. Output can be streamed into pipes etc.

I can't stream k9s output into a pipe or variable but I can with kubectl.

Would be nice if we could have the cake and eat it here. Can TUI frameworks encourage having it both ways?

> They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream

Isn't this ... everything though? Even the browser which you mention as better in the next paragraph.

> You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different

So ... Like all Apple products?

Maybe we just need to go all the way: How about a WASM core with a React GUI that runs inside a custom Electron renderer which outputs the TUI? 100% CPU guaranteed. And you'll never find that important piece of information in an all-monochrome wall of text with no icons. Why use a low-level print() when you could improve your productivity with a high-level framework? /s