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amelius

It looks incredibly nice, but ... I still think a text UI that looks like a GUI is combining the worst of two worlds.

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Have you ever used (h)top? It's great at-a-glance view of what's going on, from the command line.

Htop is an example of a good TUI but it doesn’t really look like a traditional “drawn” GUI.

I think that is the distinction that parent is making.

In a TUI environment (ignoring mouse support) traditional GUI elements and layouts often don’t make sense. Like one of the examples with all the radio buttons in small boxes.

The good TUI apps like htop, newsboat, mutt, vim/emacs, tmux all have mostly line-and-column oriented simple layout primitives.

You can use the TAB key and spacebar to navigate TUI widgets, there's no need for mouse support. TUI layouts can definitely be overdone, but they're also useful in many cases.

What's wrong with radio buttons in a TUI? The "good" htop uses checkboxes which is almost the same and works just fine.

Htop is great. Lately I've been reaching for a way to get an overview of process clusters (like firefox or vscodium like to make), and I can see there's an open feature request in htop for that. Would be a nice thing.

top is ok, but I'm always confused about the key-combinations, and the view is cropped (command line arguments etc.), so a scrollbar or some on-hover popup seems needed here.

As one of the very few ed fans. I must say I love vim too.

and mutt

Turbo Vision was quite good.

Say hello to notcurses:

https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

demo: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY

I fail to see the relation to Turbo Vision.

Fair.

Notcurses' principal author aspires for it to provide a widget toolkit for TUIs[1], but much of the demo and much of the commit log to date is heavily focused on graphical capabilities and lower-level details.

It may be that one day it ships with a robust widget toolkit; or perhaps someone else will build another library on top of notcurses with that as the principal focus.

I'm also impressed with the effort put into FinalCut[2], but notcurses seems to me to be paving a more interesting path forward for TUI development.

[1] https://nick-black.com/htp-notcurses.pdf, see e.g. page 3

[2] https://github.com/gansm/finalcut

But it needs better mouse and keyboard support.

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

Could you please expand on that?

Except if you need to run the app on remote server.

VS Code shows how utterly difficult it is to get a GUI working well in that scenario.

What scenario are you talking about, or what does VS Code have to do with anything?

Did you mean running VS Code on a remote server and forwarding it to the local machine? X11 based forwarding?

You probably just want to use the Remote SSH extension in VS Code. That should work a lot better than X11 forwarding, and it should be a lot easier than rewriting the whole GUI to use the terminal.

RDP, XWindows and VNC have worked for quite a few decades now.

My first experience with remote XWindows was using IBM X Windows terminals in 1994.

It's nice to be able to configure a kernel without a GUI available. TUIs have their place.

Yeah like using Turbo Vision and Clipper based UIs in 1992.

Well, I don't think it can be viewed as a text UI since you interact with components and don't type commands. I would say it is a keyboard based GUI.

so you're enjoying typing in commands on the terminal repetitively can you still can't see what you're doing?

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