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Comment by pragmatic | Hacker News Reader

TUIs sucked and they still suck.

Programmers are trying to bring them back bc nostalgia I guess?

I floated the idea of TUIs to our data engineering team and got very negative responses. (My nostalgia for undergrad turbo pascal TUI I guess lol)

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They are undeniably programmer-friendly though, no matter how hated by users. Much easier to do things when you are limited to just a grid of fixed size characters rather than the bizarre complexities of modern GUIs.

Care to elaborate as to why they suck?

It's not that TUIs suck in terms of their inherent capabilities. It's that they're generally a miserable tool for the job, especially if it's a big one.

TUIs are like shovels. A perfectly rational tool for doing a little bit of digging. Visual Studio 2022 is like Bagger 293.

TUIs are great! So fast and efficient to use and accomplish tasks in.

Some do and some don't. Have you ever used any to develop an application?

I suppose a lot of it is also relative. When I started with TUIs decades ago, we didn't have too many options. Turbo Pascal 5.5 or 6.0 was extremely nice to use back in the day.

I think TUIs mostly suck for IDEs, but some tools like k9s or htop are nice.

Even k9s would profit enormously from detachable dialogs. Just let me do something without losing my current log view.

There are plenty of great TUIs out there: https://terminaltrove.com/explore/

>> TUIs sucked

Compared to what available at that time?

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