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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

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People should also stop using terminal emulators. It is pretty silly to base software around ancient printing terminals. Everyone knows for a fact that only tech illiterates use a console instead of a GUI. Since all great devs use a GUI. Just a fact.

Also, people should stop playing 2D games. It is pretty silly to base your entertainment on ancient technology when modern GPUs can render super-complex 3D scenes.

And don't make me start on people who still buy vinyl...

Current GPU's can't compete with my brain 'rendering' a Slash'em/Nethack scene with my pet cat while I kick ass some foes with my Doppleganger Monk full of Wuxia/Dragon Ball/Magical Kung Fu techniques.

Honestly hard to disagree with your first point even though it's sarcasm.

It's still quite easy to end up with a terminal you need to reset your way out of (eg with a misguided cat), not to mention annoying term mismatches when using remix/screen over SSH, across OSes, or (and this is self inflicted) in containers.

Completely disingenuous. Stop the snark.

For UI there exists a straight up superior alternative, which keeps all of the benefits of the old solution. Neovim is just straight up better when used outside of a terminal emulator.

What is true for TUI vs. GUI is not true for CLI vs. GUI (or TUI for that matter) pretending the argument I made applies to the later is just dishonest. You can not replace CLI interfaces adequately by GUI or TUI interfaces, you can totally replace TUI Interfaces by GUI. See neovim as an example. It is superior software when used outside of the terminal.

Maybe on paper. But the snappy low-latency feel of TUI apps in the terminal is a joy, and unequaled in GUIs.

>Maybe on paper. But the snappy low-latency feel of TUI apps in the terminal is a joy, and unequaled in GUIs.

This is not true at all. Terminal emulators are GUIs, the TUI is just another layer on top of that GUI. Using a TUI will always introduces additional latency, depending on the quality of the terminal emulator.

I do not know what GUIs or TUIs you are using, but my KDE Apps are all extremely snappy.

TUIs are the best cross platform apps. They run on all the major and minor platforms in general use. GUIs cannot compete with browsers being the next closest thing. They can be integrated with the shell and also work perfectly well remotely w/o issues. TUIs are superior in many ways to GUIs and have a place in the ecosystem.

> TUIs are superior in many ways to GUIs and have a place in the ecosystem.

There's another reason you don't mention.

Consistent UI.

TUI apps can (and in the Windows world usually do) use the same keyboard controls, derived from IBM CUA, as their GUI equivalents do.

This is why I use Tilde in the Linux shell: the same commands work in it as in Pluma or Leafpad or Mousepad or whatever: Ctrl+O opens a file, Ctrl-X/C/V to cut/copy/paste, Ctrl+N for new, etc.

TUIs do not even run the same across terminal emulators.

It is a total joke to call something which depends on how the underlying terminal emulator interprets specific ANSI escape sequences "multi platform".

Most of my work is done on remote machines. Nothing beats tmux+tuis in this paradigm.

I rather stick with RDP, or browser based workflows.

They are fine, however RDP requires more bandwidth and most of the stuff I run is terminal commands anyway.

Company I work for has a great browser based IDE but that’s something I would never setup and maintain for a personal project.

Modern terminals do color just fine-- 24 bit color support has existed since 2010-ish, and been mainstream since 2015.

There's nothing wrong with graphical IDEs... or text user interfaces. Great developers use both. Low effort troll is low effort.

+1 - crap code can come out of notepad / emacs / vi or IDE-flavor-of-the-day or even the AI code sausage maker. Testing, specification, knowing what you are building and why still matters.

Agreed, we used TUIs because we couldn't afford anything better on MS-DOS, CP/M, 8 bit home computers.

People on better systems like the Amiga and Atari were already past that.

Vim was born in Amiga and Amiga OS came with some Emacs clone.

I surely don't remember such clone.

As for where Vim was born, hardly matters, it was someone with UNIX culture background, that happened to own an Amiga.

> I surely don't remember such clone.

I think they mean MicroEmacs. Despite its name, it was not Emacs, but it had Emacs-like keyboard shortcuts, multiple buffers, and macros, which was quite neat for a free 1986 application on a home computer.

I guess that is it, thank for the memory refresher, and to be more precise, MEmacs.

Amiga OS 3.1 has it under the Workbench floppy sets. You get it by default.

Amiga 500 was shipped with AmigaOS 1.2 in 1987, Amiga OS 3.1 was released in 1994, almost at the end of the commercial life of Amiga.

As the sibling comment points out, MicroEmacs isn't really Emacs.

Also Emacs history is older than UNIX, and overlaps with Lisp Machines.

SSH comes to mind.

How so? I use remote machines all the time, why would I need a TUI for that? VSCode and zed support editing on remote machines and the machine drives are also mounted on the local machine? What purpose would any TUI have? What even are the potential benefits?

Right now I can use the exact same software I use on my local machine. Can you give me any reason why I should consider anything else?

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