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Comment by jessmay | Hacker News Reader

The user interfaces have graphical components and menus if you bothered opening the link.

There may be a general misconception of GUI[1] vs TUI[2] nowadays.

The requirement for a Graphical UI (GUI) is that the user interacts with it via graphical icons and visual indicators. These can exist within a terminal. So, personally I would say WordGrinder and Finch are GUIs in this literal sense. However, your typical lay user may not interpret it this way.

TUI is a sort of abstract term. Sometimes people mean Text UI and sometimes people mean Terminal UI. I don't think these are mutual exclusive. I would understand a text-only UI to be without any visual indicators, whereas terminal UI could be either text or visual. I guess its also worth noting that the phrase 'TUI' was coined after 'GUI'. Perhaps TUI was coined to differentiate the traditional GUI application (a window drawn on a screen with sliders/buttons) from the traditional terminal application (text-only commands). But nowadays, we have libraries like ncurses, that allow us to draw things within a terminal.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface

There are also at least two "types" of TUI; one is exemplified by ncurses-based apps - they're essentially GUIs that render to ASCII instead of bitmaps. Another is exemplified by everything that runs on Emacs as a platform - there, all[0] text in TUI is bona-fide data; you can search for it, jump to it, copy it, read it from other programs running on Emacs, etc. The latter style enables levels of interoperability unseen in GUIs and regular TUIs of today.

[0] - Almost; some modes use "graphical" indicators like horizontal lines which are really just decorations. You can mess with them if you try hard enough, but by default they'll be ignored by usual operations like navigation, search or copy/paste.

What exactly is stopping Emacs from improving its rendering and bringing it on par with "GUI"-like ncurses apps? They already support multiple on-screen windows, a global menubar and all sorts of "widgets" for interactive use.

What do you mean? Emacs way is strictly superior to ncurses here.

oh give me a fucking break you know what it means, stop being obtuse. “how to live entirely in a terminal”. the author is talking about using terminal-only applications (which of course have interfaces and “graphical” components)

If we're that pedantic, then any visual representation of plain text is also "graphical".

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