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Comment by 0x000xca0xfe | Hacker News Reader

Very nice, this can be used to build a cool motd :)

Not about this project specifically, but there seems to be a general trend towards TUIs. As someone currently working on a native GTK+ app, the state of native deskop UIs is horrible. GTK+ with all the depreciations? Painful. Win32? Oh god. UWP? Please, no. UIKit or Swift? Desktop software is no longer important enough to support multiple platforms natively...

I feel like we are headed towards a split between Electron for end user applications and TUI for portable tools. They even run on servers and modern terminals on any platform can "render" the UI!

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> I feel like we are headed towards a split between Electron for end user applications and TUI for portable tools

Another common hack is for a tool to serve a web UI on localhost, like Jupyter or Datasette. If you need to run the tool on a firewalled server, you can use SSH port forwarding to access the web UI.

So, VT220 (with some extensions like Unicode) is again going to become the common ground of somehow rich interfaces?

In fact, this is happening. My filesystem UI is Midnight Commander for a long time, but my k8s UI is k9s, and it's new, and works equally effortlessly on a Mac and on a Linux box.

> Win32? Oh god.

Uh, no?

Win32: Simple to write, and works anywhere, thanks to wine.

> Desktop software is no longer important enough to support multiple platforms natively

Win32 is the closest we have to native multiplatform support with a single binary

> TUI for portable tools

If you use cosmopolitan, yes it can be even better: one binary working everywhere, with no need for emulators.

I think wine compiled with cosmopolitan is the future: - if running on windows, don't use wine - on linux or macos, use wine

> They even run on servers and modern terminals on any platform can "render" the UI!

There are X servers rendering in sixel format, so the above could be completed by adding a this X server to render within a sixel-aware terminal (say for when X will be deprecated)

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