Comment by vidarh
17 hours ago
I really don't want my TUI's to look like GUI's rendered in low res. The appeal to me of a TUI is that it is built specifically to be a TUI, and that means eschewing complexity and detail, and favouring compact text.
17 hours ago
I really don't want my TUI's to look like GUI's rendered in low res. The appeal to me of a TUI is that it is built specifically to be a TUI, and that means eschewing complexity and detail, and favouring compact text.
> GUI's rendered in low res
That's literally what TUI's looked like starting from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s... You have a pointing device, might as well make use of it to enhance discoverability.
This seems really reductive. Some UI paradigms work better at 80x24 vs at 640x480 (never mind whatever resolutions we have access to today). Or rather, the 80x24 text grid is using more pixels than that, but everything is aligned to that lower resolution, and that fundamentally changes what makes sense to do. Floating windows that can be dragged around to arbitrary positions? Terrible for low-res; classic for higher res. Dividing lines that split the screen into panels, and can be moved around a row or column at a time with a keyboard shortcut? Pretty much the opposite (enthusiasts of "tiling WMs" might disagree).
None of the TUI's I use look like that.
They all have very different structure to what a typical GUI look like. E.g. a focus on condensing more information in few text cells, and usually not displaying anything extraneous, typically rarely using dialogs etc.
There are notable exceptions to that, sure, but as I noted that is exactly what I have no interest in.
Didn't they evolve from that because better graphics was better? Otherwise why not stay text if there is a huge advantage in all Text made graphics?
This is why I don't like TUIs at all, they're really bad at displaying complex information, handling complex interactions, and discovering how to compose those together.
Most of my complex information is text, for which TUI's work just fine.
For the rest, I typically use a browser.