Comment by MBCook
12 hours ago
They’re not terminal UIs.
They’re attempts at pretending to have Windows (etc.) GUIs in a terminal.
Same stuff people made for DOS when Windows wasn’t common or good enough yet.
I’m not surprised they’re a disaster. Or built without understanding the abilities of the terminal they’re running on.
If you don't want people calling these apps TUIs, what would you prefer people call them? And what does the term TUI refer to, if not this?
Text User Interface.
But what _is_ a "Text User Interface"? Google Images just returns what is being discussed here: "GUIs" that run in some kind of text mode. And to me, that's also what a TUI is.
A more textually oriented environment (like a normal Unix shell) is, in my experience, usually referred to as a CLI: Command Line Interface.
I did find an interesting hybrid in the Pi coding agent: it seems to leverage the normal terminal scrollback, while still enhancing it with things like transient input fields and status lines, so that it can display those without cluttering scrollback.
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>They’re not terminal UIs. They’re attempts at pretending to have Windows (etc.) GUIs in a terminal.
That's what a terminal UI is, and has been since Emacs was a thing.
> They’re not terminal UIs.
Actually, I think that is close to a good name for them: Terminal-based GUIs.
Some are pretty useful, for instance I like lazygit as a simple dashboard/panel for a small repo (or when making small changes to a larger one), some make me wonder what those who made them were smoking!
The less silly ones are handy when you are tinkering with a far away machine and want something a little more interactive than CLI commands and stuff connected by pipes and scripts but don't want to deal with the latency of GUI remoting. Some, though, are so badly thought out that they are slower than using a browser over long-distance X…
There are useful ones. Something like Midnight Commander can be way better than lots of manual copy and move commands. The kernel config one is way nicer than the stream style kernel configuration tool. Some of these newer ones are starting to feel more like “text mode bling” than useful.
My objection to TUI is I don’t think it’s clear enough for what’s happening here. I think you could easily argue that applies to most readline style stream CLI programs.
Would you call a fully 3D UI in VR, not a planar in the VR world but true 3D, a GUI? It is graphical by definition. But if you talked to someone about a GUI that’s not what they’d think you’re talking about without additional context.
That’s my objection. I think TUI implies way less than what these programs are doing. Yeah it can describe them but I don’t think it should be the word for them.
Real UNIX terminal:
https://youtu.be/Pr1XXvSaVUQ
Also terminal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gUd8yVZ2kA
Terminal:
https://youtu.be/frMwsDTjmAs?t=493
the first and second are graphics terminals which is muddling up the definition. of course they were called terminals back then until we decided to make a distinction. what they are called is not the point. the point is the distinction. for today's discussion terminal means text without graphics, as shown in the third video.
the real question is why are we still using text terminals?
the short answer is that on remote connections graphics is still a performance issue. in fact the popular solution to making remote graphics performant is webbrowsers. they are the graphical terminals of today.
if i want to build a graphical interface to a remote service, then i build a webinterface.
locally, the answer is historical tools, and that text interfaces are easier to develop and still more efficient to use. but not easier. especially commandline tools without an actual visual interface.
i just had this situation. the dolphin filemanager has a feature to add tags and comments to files. the interface is very clunky. but there is a commandline that lets me set those tags and comments which is much more efficient once you learned how to use that command.
A shell is the environmental manager, the terminal is the display device, and the window is the container. Add in tabs, web panes and sticky notes + make it all agentic, you get Hyperia: https://hyperia.nuts.services