Hacker News Reader

Comment by EgregiousCube | Hacker News Reader

I really like the new wave of TUI aesthetic that's been worming its way into Linux user interfaces lately. Check out Omarchy's desktop distro if you want more of that aesthetic throughout your OS, it does a good job if that's the look and feel you want.

View on HN

And I really dislike them. The nice thing about CLI is that you can compose them quite easily. You can compose your own report giving you what you want and none of what you don’t want.

And most of those TUI are badly designed in terms of configurability. Especially the ise of colors and “effects”.

TUI and CLI are not the same thing. TUI is a GUI, and GUIs have never been composable.

I think they understand that. They're saying they dislike TUIs and prefer CLIs because CLIs are composable.

> and GUIs have never been composable.

Sure they have, or at least it has been tried. I think it turns out to be such a hard problem to solve that it degrades into proper programing much faster than a cli where pipes can carry hard.

Some examples:

The first xerox alto interface.

smalltalk

Microsofts OLE

Lately? Tiling window managers with open terminals running TUI programs have been the focal point in r/unixporn since ever. All looking like poor imitations of Oberon system which actually combined text/graphical interfaces.

Btop really captures that '90s warez group feel.

I am all in favour of better TUIs. Omarchy unfortunately does not interest me ever since DHH decided to take more control of the ruby-ecosystem via shopify.

Me too. It make it a lot easier to filter out the kids.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com