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Comment by sprash | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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