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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad.

You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Case in point from Emacs/Vim and the Borland IDEs to Claude, plus all kinds of handy utils from mc and htop to mutt.

>They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely

That's not necessarily bad. Not everything has to be open ended.

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Funnily, Emacs is getting closer to what I’m after (it’s my main editor).

> That's not necessarily bad. Not everything has to be open ended.

I think it is necessarily bad and everything should be open ended. Bad in the sense of low quality, but if we’re talking about critical accessibility (someone is unable to use your application at all), morally bad too.

How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim?

In many ways, GUI was developed as the natural evolution of TUI. X server, with its client-server architecture, is meant to allow you to interact with remote sessions via "casted" GUI rather than a terminal.

Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason.

TUI just got the nostalgia "coolness".

>How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim?

How many people eat microwave meals? How many eat gourmet Michelin star dishes?

I don't care "how many use VSCode". My argument Emacs/Vim have great, well loved TUIs. And they are used by a huge number of the most respected coders in the industry. Whether a million React jockeys use VSCode doesn't negate this.

>Countless engineers spent many man-hours to develop theories and frameworks for creating GUI for a reason.

Yes, it sells to the masses. Countless food industry scientists aspend many man-hours to develop detrimental ultra-processed crap for a reason too.

The analogy mostly makes a point for snobbishness, but otherwise doesn’t really work. Most people would rather eat meals prepped by a Michelin star cook, but they can only afford microwave meals - whereas EMacs/Vim and VSCode are equally accessible to anyone.

I love emacs but would never compare that with a Michelin meal! On the contrary, emacs is the DIY option that lets you experiment with whatever ingredients you please without judging your choices!

I think their point was about “most popular” not necessarily meaning “better”. I don’t think they meant anything more by it

>Most people would rather eat meals prepped by a Michelin star cook,

You'd be surprised. Most people can't eat anything adventurous or out of the junk-food category with some comfort food staples thrown in.

> My argument Emacs/Vim have great, well loved TUIs.

They... are not great. They provide the absolute bare minimum of an UI.

An UI, even a terminal one, is more than a couple of boxes with text in them. Unfortunately, actual great TUIs more or less died in the 1990s. You can google Turbo Vision for examples.

The vast majority of people don't use the Emacs TUI and it is explicitly recommended to use the GUI.

> How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim?

Perhaps I'm in some sort of "TUI bubble", but I'd bet good money that Emacs/Vim users outnumber VSCode users by an order of magnitude. But maybe I'm just surrounded by *nix devs.

I'll take that bet

No need to guess, the SO survey is probably still representative of the state of development environments:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-dev-id-es

Note that respondents may use multiple tools, but around 76% answered VSCode, whereas 24% answered Vim.

So, I’d wager you’re indeed in a *nix bubble.

It's more indicative of the state of SO users.

Care to bet even those 24% vim devs code circles around the VSCode ones?

That's no sure thing - plenty of vim users are new or not particularly knowledgeable, they just chose their village' for various reasons.

That is so different than I expected. Thank you for the link.

The SO survey was skewed to begin with, and by 2025 it covers a much reduced fraction of past users. See:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/437921/1593077

Not that your conclusion is necessarily wrong of course.

> but I'd bet good money that Emacs/Vim users outnumber VSCode users by an order of magnitude

No, no they don't. Enterprise and gaming alone would easily invalidate your bet.

Buddy, I am here to inform you that you are projecting.

I agree except about the TUI coolness factor. There really is a lot that’s appealing about TUIs, I agree on that with the other commenters here. I want a better synthesis than what we have.

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