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Comment by coldtea

12 hours ago

>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.

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coldtea

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dwb  6 hours ago

Funnily, Emacs is getting closer to what I’m after (it’s my main editor).

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

I think it is necessarily bad and everything should be open ended. Bad in the sense of low quality, but if we’re talking about critical accessibility (someone is unable to use your application at all), morally bad too.

utilize1808  12 hours ago

How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim?

In many ways, GUI was developed as the natural evolution of TUI. X server, with its client-server architecture, is meant to allow you to interact with remote sessions via "casted" GUI rather than a terminal.

Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason.

TUI just got the nostalgia "coolness".

  • coldtea  11 hours ago

    >How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim?

    How many people eat microwave meals? How many eat gourmet Michelin star dishes?

    I don't care "how many use VSCode". My argument Emacs/Vim have great, well loved TUIs. And they are used by a huge number of the most respected coders in the industry. Whether a million React jockeys use VSCode doesn't negate this.

    >Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason.

    Yes, it sells to the masses. Countless food industry scientists aspend many man-hours to develop detrimental ultra-processed crap for a reason too.

    • 9dev  6 hours ago

      The analogy mostly makes a point for snobbishness, but otherwise doesn’t really work. Most people would rather eat meals prepped by a Michelin star cook, but they can only afford microwave meals - whereas EMacs/Vim and VSCode are equally accessible to anyone.

      1 reply →

    • Pay08  2 hours ago

      The vast majority of people don't use the Emacs TUI and it is explicitly recommended to use the GUI.

    • troupo  6 hours ago

      > My argument Emacs/Vim have great, well loved TUIs.

      They... are not great. They provide the absolute bare minimum of an UI.

      An UI, even a terminal one, is more than a couple of boxes with text in them. Unfortunately, actual great TUIs more or less died in the 1990s. You can google Turbo Vision for examples.

  • jazzyb  11 hours ago

    > How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim?

    Perhaps I'm in some sort of "TUI bubble", but I'd bet good money that Emacs/Vim users outnumber VSCode users by an order of magnitude. But maybe I'm just surrounded by *nix devs.

  • dwb  4 hours ago

    I agree except about the TUI coolness factor. There really is a lot that’s appealing about TUIs, I agree on that with the other commenters here. I want a better synthesis than what we have.