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Comment by emilfihlman | Hacker News Reader

The thing with TUIs is that, using mobile native virtual keyboards, it's apparently quite impossible to make them behave in a sane way in browsers!

I think the only reasonable option seems to be reimplementing one yourself, which is massively stupid.

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Mobile is not for TUI

More specifically it's an interface designed for a physical keyboard. Or even more specifically it's designed for precise and easy human text input.

especially where you typically type with all fingers instead of just your thumbs

Sure it is. I, and millions of others, use it all the time with for example Termux.

My Ratatui test app (Conway's Life) runs great in Termux. :)

Termux is seriously amazing (with its quirks, of course)!

Have you tried porting your test app to a web page? I'd really like to have a good TUI experience on the web.

I use TUIs almost daily on my android phone, either some Linux application in Termux or a DOS application in DOSBox. Both have some extra on screen controls to add special keys, and DOSBox in particular allows adding widgets to control things (including invisible buttons, that are fun to add in some cases over parts of the screen in DOS to give an old game or application touch controls).

I also use Termux daily!

It's really a superb tool.

I only wish we could have that same experience without requiring a native app.

If you have a TUI the correct way to support mobile browsers is to 1-shot a React page equivalent. Trying to make the mobile keyboard work for this would be silly.

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