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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

They are GUIs --- just minecraft GUIs. One day, we will rediscover why GUI toolkits exist. The only real advantage TUIs have over GUIs is easy remoting, TBH. Maybe that's enough for people. Otherwise? They're just hair shirts.

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I've use Claude to make myself a number of little tools and weird apps that only I would want lately. They need to be cross-platform between Linux and Mac and sometimes Windows. The best approaches I've found are Tauri (+Svelte for making layout easier) for lightweight GUIs but for anything more complex I prefer a TUI. The Ratatui framework works very well. A TUI feels like a "real" app as opposed to a glorified webpage. For actually serious software I'd want a native GUI on each platform.

> A TUI feels like a "real" app as opposed to a glorified webpage.

Huh? "Feels"? Plenty of Electron/Tauri apps feel perfectly normal. Like I've been saying, the TUI craze is just a fad.

A TUI app feels like a native terminal app like I have used for my entire computing life, in DOS and then Linux. Electron apps feel like web apps no matter how good they are. I stopped using 1Password when it became an Electron app and became super janky. Discord, Slack, VS Code, the Signal desktop app, all suck UI-wise compared to actual native Mac apps, which even with Liquid Ass, are still better than using web technology for desktop apps. I know that lowest common denominator cross platform apps make economic sense to develop, whatever. They still suck to use.

Again this word "feels". Is it not just nostalgia?

No. Good TUI apps are predictable and fast, like good native GUI apps. They follow set patterns. Familiarity and following standard conventions is not just "nostalgia" -- maybe a little is in there -- but it makes apps more usable. And, for cross-platform apps, it's a cross-platform standard. I'd rather have a TUI app following TUI conventions than a cross-platform app that is just a freeform mish-mash. Like, this week I've been making a TUI replacement for Plexamp which has great features but its Mac app is just like a scrolling webpage. If I am going to have a GUI app that is more than a tiny toy or utility I want it to follow each platform's native conventions and use its native GUI components or to not even bother. I will grant that Electron has made strides in terms of properly integrating into each host OS (using the full Mac menu bar, the correct keyboard shortcuts, accessibility features and so on) so the situation is not as bad as it once was. And also, plenty of people use and have used terminal editors and other tools by choice, for years, and not just because they are connecting to remote servers. A keyboard-first interface can be quite fast and they are more natural in TUIs.

There are so many options for what you describe. E.g. the whole point of Tcl/Tk is to allow easy creation of small little tools and apps. And you can use Tk with Python as well.

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