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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

Question: do people love TUI, because they love being in a terminal?

Or ... is this a movement against application bloat, which has become all to common these days?

EDIT: why the downvotes?

They are very convenient when I work on remote servers over ssh, even if it's just my server at home. Programs I use regularly (no specific order):

vim ncdu nnn mqqtui htop gitui tmux lnav lazydocker ctop

If you develop SQL you need to write code and view tables. A grid with monospace characters is perfectly suitable for that.

But other than that, no, people don't love being in a terminal. It just happens that all open source portable toolkits like qt and gtk do not work via ssh and are in general total abominations for developers and users. The vt100 standard is 45 years old and turned out to be the lowest common denominator to write GUIs for better or worse.

Me. I love being in the terminal. Full-screen nvim with split buffers. If I want a terminal I can spawn it from inside nvim as a new buffer, or use my terminal emulator (kitty)’s native split functionality. I can do git actions without leaving nvim, too.

I actually like being in the terminal for the most part. The vast majority of GUI applications are a huge disappointment.

In case of client-server databases one alternative that works great is to open an ssh tunnel using "ssh -L" and just connect using gui tool to it.

> "if you develop SQL you need to write code and view tables ... [other tools] do not work via ssh"

Are you implying that people only write code inside of a terminal ssh session?

It doesn't seem like it to me. ISTM that they're implying that most sql tools have a gui component which isn't friendly to running remotely over an ssh session.

I've personally never seen a good experience of display forwarding over ssh.

Of course, most people and tools get around this by tunneling a connection to the database over ssh and running the GUI locally.

I believe their next sentence took away the need to try to infer anything, and in fact made their point quite clear:

> A grid with monospace characters is perfectly suitable for that.

> The vt100 standard is 45 years old and turned out to be the lowest common denominator to write GUIs for better or worse.

I would say the web browser is the lowest common denominator

That's assuming you can open up a port on a remote machine, which isn't always the case.

I like TUI because it usually works nicely with multiplexer like zellij or tmux. Open a new pane or tab where you can open a new set of TUI apps.

Like have Helix or Nvim open, but you want to quickly check your database queries code changes. You can just open a new tab run the this sql IDE, fire off some queries check the result if it matches go back to coding new features. If not change the code, check queries again etc etc.

Speaking for myself, it wasn't a "movement against application bloat" so much as a "frustrated response to these darn bloated applications." There wasn't anything ideological about it, I literally ran out of memory a few times when using VSCode. The important thing is that editing plain text works perfectly well in a terminal, whereas you need a modern GUI for most other business-related software.

I switched to emacs during the pandemic because of Zoom and Slack (along with my horrible browser habits). VSCode is pretty reasonable on resources compared to many Electron apps, and I slightly prefer it to emacs in terms of overall experience. But emacs is also good, and there were just too many Zoom calls where my computer ran out of memory, with VSCode having a glaringly high footprint. I think at the time its terminal emulator was either excessively inefficient, or it had a specific resource leak. So maybe things have gotten better, but I've stuck with emacs regardless.

These days I can let a few dozen unread tabs in Firefox fill in the extra ~1GB of memory VSCode was formerly occupying :)

I do a lot of work with SQLite, and I do sometimes use one of the GUI clients (specifically sqlitebrowser.org). However, I mostly use the command line client that comes with SQLite, not because of how many features it has (not a lot) but because I use Bash and everything that comes with it, across various sessions managed with Tmux, as part of what I do with SQLite. It’s the same reason I usually use Vim in a terminal session instead of the GUI version. Using the GUI version means stepping away from a lot of my best tools.

Another advantage is that TUI apps can be easily used over SSH.

1. I occasionally have to browse databases through SSH. 2. The CLI / TUI apps take less memory. 3. They also don't lag and lag is something I am absolutely sick of. 4. Easy to build habits in terms of blind keyboard pressing (very much like cashiers on the older DOS keyboard-only software in retail shops; you just know where everything is and are times more productive).

I originally wrote this because sometimes a CLI or TUI is just super convenient. I used to use the DuckDB and Sqlite CLIs a lot, but was frustrated by their limitations, especially for doing data analysis work (my background).

For those who prefer GUI apps, dbnet is an option to serve via HTTP. Run it remote side, access in the browser.

https://github.com/dbnet-io/dbnet

I'm not excited about it being a TUI, I'm just excited because it looks reasonable and I haven't found a macOS SQL client for writing queries that I was excited about yet

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