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Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

I miss the simplicity and utility of textual UIs. Nothing unneeded, and everything you need. No filler. No giant gaps between elements or wasted pixels. No fads which do silly things like hide scrollbars or other interactive elements.

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.

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I agree with your claims about the potential advantages of a TUI, but in this case, almost all of these TUIs using Rich will be running as GUI graphics inside a GUI window on top of a GUI OS subsystem, driven by an interpreted Python subsystem, all on an OS juggling many other simultaneous deep-stack processes. In other words, it's a keyboard-driven GUI app making use of the GUI advantages to provide you with your choice of high-quality fonts and designer colors to emulate a TUI. That doesn't make it bad. I still like it.

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?

On Ubuntu, sometimes I like to do Ctrl-Alt-F3 to get into a tty, login, and then do `sudo init 3` to shutdown everything pertaining to the graphical shell. The interaction with the computer is much faster there.

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.

[1] https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich

> sudo init 3` to shutdown everything pertaining to the graphical shell

The modern systemd equivalent is:

  systemctl isolate multi-user

> sudo init 7 […] which brings me back to my graphical shell.

  systemctl isolate graphical

  systemctl isolate default

Can anyone explain why systemd exists besides just saying "Leonart"?

The 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.

Lennart explains it quite well in his initial blog post project announcement: http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd

I do something similar with a similar toolset – except that I use mutt for email, don’t use it for music and I’ve been experimenting with other browsers such as w3m and (e)links. I do this mostly for the distraction-free experience.

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.

I have wayland (sway) when logging in on tty1, a terminal in the others to achieve something like that without having to use a DM.

I wish I could do that, but I depend on JIRA + Slack + GitLab (code reviews) to do my work and they force me to use Firefox/Chrome. :(

If you run fbterm on the console, you can get much improved unicode and color support.

Regarding text UIs close to the metal, that made me think of this short (1 minute 20 seconds) segment in a recent video by The 8-Bit Guy on YouTube [1].

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. :)

[1]: https://youtu.be/HWpi9n2H3kE?t=521

I'm not opposed to TUIs managed in resizable windows on a graphical desktop. I just feel that most programs would be better suited to actual use if they were textual. Restraint fosters creativity and efficiency.

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.

One thing, TUIs are MUCH MUCH worse for screen readers than (well made) websites.

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.

On the other hand, emacs works really well with emacsspeak. So it is possible.

At one point, web designers were making an effort to use semantic markup and create a "semantic web." That sure would have been nice for the screen readers.

In practice, much of the modern web still works well with screen readers (although it could be better of course). Some things break horribly (in particular, infinite scrolling is often a problem).

Where's lynx when you need it? [0]

[0] https://lynx.browser.org/

And I might add, it's the oldest web browser still being maintained. Since 1992.

Why does this website write "Un*x" as if it's some kind of swear word?

It was, at the time of the Unix wars, a rather childish way of 'protesting' the use of trademarks on the name 'UNIX' by AT&T, Novell, SCO etc. in their fights against other Unixy OS vendors. There were urban legends going around on IRC and Usenet that those companies would sue everybody using the word 'Unix' but not using the full name would absolve you of that responsibility. Legally this in the class of 'cops can't lie to you when you ask them if they're a cop' and 'free men doctrine' and such but it was wide spread at the time.

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.

It's a common way to express "things that are unix-like" and avoiding the pedanticism of what is & isn't an actual UNIX™

I tend to use *nix for things that are UNIX-like. I think of un*x in the older sense from the other parent "it's not actually UNIX and f*ck the trademark" but I'm not sure that dichotomy in my mind is useful anymore.

> No giant gaps between elements or wasted pixels. No fads which do silly things like hide scrollbars or other interactive elements

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.

> 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.)

> 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.

This is not true; there is an underline attribute which can add a ~1px horizontal line without taking up any additional space.

> They're probably a lot easier for screen-readers, too.

That might be true for more minimal TUIs, but I don't think most screen-readers can handle the multi-paneled ones like OP.

They could if the TUI had runtime/library designed for it.

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.

as a person who has the basic HTML version of gmail as his default, I understand.

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