The future repeats the past. This looks much like the back-end systems I used to design on TurboPascal in the late 1980s / early 1990s.
Except for CAD applications and some games, almost everything we do online today could be accomplished via textual UI. Almost the entire internet could be replaced with TUIs and a lot of things would be better and more straightforward, and nearly everyone would be able to do what they need to do online.
TUIs are fast, they are light, they are ultra responsive and ... Yeah. They're definitely underrated. They're probably a lot easier for screen-readers, too.
I'm not suggesting that we undo everything and make a TUI web, but I do want to point out that we do a hell of a lot on today's UIs that we don't need to do, solely because some designer who wants to make pretty things that function poorly said so.
And I might add, it's the oldest web browser still being maintained. Since 1992.
The irony is of course that Unix-like OS vendors spend so much time fighting each other that it was basically mutually assured destruction, and proprietary Unix systems went the way of the dinosaur after the dot com crash.
But like you, I wish we had more options to fully exercise the power of a TUI much closer to the metal, like the old days. Apps where almost every keystroke completes an operation faster than the fastest typist can move from key to key....
Of course, beyond a certain speed, more speed wouldn't matter, so maybe I could get it by installing a (local, not remote) desktop Linux without any GUI and using only CLI dev tools. Is anyone doing this?
After I get bored, I do either `sudo init 7` to be sure, but mostly just Ctrl-Alt-F1, which brings me back to my graphical shell.
This method has the advantage that you are always on the same system, not needing anything else. Oh, also the music works, if you don't kill the GUI with the first `init` call.
Coupled with tmux, emacs/vim, nvlc, lynx, and coreutils, you can really be more productive there, from the extra speed, less memory requirements, and less available distractions.
EDIT: I could not find the actual link to the library either on HN or in the OP, so I am linking it here [1], for the convenience of myself and others.
The modern systemd equivalent is:
systemctl isolate multi-user
systemctl isolate graphical
systemctl isolate defaultThe way people just replace things instead of addressing the issues in the old things bothers me.
init.d wasn't multithreaded. Ok, so give it threads. Etc.
My workstation defaults to booting into the equivalent of run-level 3 (no display manager) and when I get tired of being in text mode, I just run `startx` for the graphical interface.
In it, Mr Murray live-codes a simple program to display all 256 characters in the C64's character set, by directly poking them into video memory (that's close to the metal, right?).
Once in BASIC, and once in machine code, to show the contrast in speed. It's pretty impressive even now, and that's running on a 1-MHz 8-bit processor. :)
As an application developer, you'd certainly be much more in tune with how well your application is performing if you could feel a dip in performance the way I remember feeling it when a TUI wasn't responding quite as quickly as it was a few seconds earlier. Giving users insight into your application's performance is a good thing, because I think we put out and put up with unreasonably slow software far too often these days.
That might be true for more minimal TUIs, but I don't think most screen-readers can handle the multi-paneled ones like OP.
Emacs as a platform is a good example here - the TUI that you can achieve in it is similar to web GUIs made of standard components - in the the UI isn't just pixels on a 256-bit canvas, but it's made of building blocks that you can inspect, select, copy, and that gracefully enhance/degrade when you switch between graphical and terminal modes.
TUIs (as currently designed) have no structure, so it's very difficult to move around from section to section. A website with headers and auto-wrapping text is much easier to move around and read with a screen reader.
I call bullshit on this.
Using fixed character cell grid for UI absolutely wastes ton of space. First of all just basic text takes more space in fixed-width than variable width. But the biggest offender is any layout or ui elements that would not need whole cell. Even basic 1px horizontal line takes 10px of height or whatever. Places where 1 or 2 px padding could do will use full cell instead.
And then there is of course the space waste from forcing all text to be same size. For tons of applications the UI elements could do with smaller font than content, but none of that is possible with TUI.
I find your example of hiding scrollbars hilarious, considering that TUIs are in general far worse offenders in that area specifically. For example none of the examples for Rich here show scrollbars..
I do also believe that in terms of performance TUIs leave lot on the table, because they are forced to go through all sort of weird legacy layers. Pushing pixels on screen and receiving key events directly almost certainly should be faster/more efficient than going through tty layer and terminal emulation.
Why do you think it needs to be faster? Do you currently have issues with complexity or latency? Have you measured it? Do you think that replacing the current abstractions with new abstractions will really be a net improvement?
A terminal emulator is pretty much the least non-trivial resource-intensive graphical application I can think of. I've been running Linux on the desktop for over two decades and can't think of a single time I thought the terminal emulator I was using at the time was too slow. (Which is why I don't really understand the need for CPU-accelerated terminal emulators, but that's a different kettle of worms.)
This is not true; there is an underline attribute which can add a ~1px horizontal line without taking up any additional space.
It's reinventing the wheel, but a car tire is a welcome improvement to a wooden wagon wheel.
https://github.com/magiblot/turbo
Applications like tvedit were designed for MS-DOS, which offered full interaction with the mouse and keyboard, and many of them were commercial products aimed at a general audience. TUI applications from the Unix tradition, however, were designed for use in terminals with limited capabilities, and were aimed at more technical users (or were created by the users themselves).
User-friendly TUI applications in MS-DOS were succeeded by Windows applications, while the largest revolution in the last 20 years in Unix TUIs has been the widespread support of 256/24-bit colors and UTF-8. Hence the gap in usability between the two worlds.
I certainly get that a good library yesterday might not be good today or that an existing library's style might not meet this language's style but I doubt the need to rewrite existing libraries so often. Even with the much-maligned PHP, libraries were frequently bindings to other libraries.