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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

I really don't get terminal UIs that try to rebuild GUI-like functionality. Don't we think that computer interfaces should get better? We're not limited to a grid of characters to pretend to draw lines and shapes with anymore. You can't even display an image in a terminal without a non-standard terminal like Kitty or iTerm.

It's just a shame that we don't have a great cross-platform, streamed, UI system. The web is great in it's own ways, but clearly something could be a lot better for this purpose. Flutter's ok, but not on-demand enough and too married to Dart.

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This is because of the failure of the modern GUI environment.

They want a GUI, but, instead, they have to resort to something like this. A GUI in a TUI.

They want something portable. They want something that can run remotely. They want something they can run more safely than having to expose a socket. They don't want to have to bring up an entire desktop.

Rootless windows are effectively dead. That leaves web interfaces (and all of their issues) or doing a TUI, where all you need is an SSH connection that everyone already has.

In the past you could slap something together with Tcl/Tk, and just launch the window over X Windows. That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

The LCD is SSH, and these are the only things that fit.

Agreed. I dread GUI development, hence I never build GUIs. If there were a library for my language of choice that worked multi-platform and used native components then I’d be interested.

> That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

I was quite recently, but even then remote X is missing a really big usability piece: keeping a long-running application open on the host and periodically connecting to it from a remote node (concretely: connecting to my server from my laptop). VNC/RDP/etc all do this at the desktop level, but they're pretty mediocre experience-wise.

tmux gives me this for terminal applications without really any compromises. I run tmux for local terminals as well as remote terminals; the hotkeys are all deep muscle memory at this point. It just works.

> That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

If you:

1. Have a low-latency connection to a decent machine, and 2. Are on a machine that's weak, or isn't yours, or that you don't fully control (e.g. employer forces you to run Windows)

... then you live in remote X apps my friend.

> You can't even display an image in a terminal without a non-standard terminal like Kitty or iTerm.

Sixels are supported by many terminals[0] (several of the terminals mentioned that do not support them are based on GNOME VTE for which support is in the works and, based on the bug tracker comments, it seems to be almost done).

This includes xterm which is probably the most "standard terminal" on X11 you can get.

[0] https://www.arewesixelyet.com/

> really don't get terminal UIs that try to rebuild GUI-like functionality.

Because it's easy to get things done for a TUI, but if I create a proper GUI, my codebase is suddenly more complex. And it's not like there's a solid, reliable GUI toolkit that I can use, they're all riddled with different bugs and caveats.

> Flutter's ok

If you ignore the absolute nightmare that is building applications in Flutter. Even Flutter itself isn't really designed to be compiled by anyone (although, in practice, your distro will shield you from this issue).

> It's just a shame that we don't have a great cross-platform, streamed, UI system.

It's called the web/Jupyter. And no, web-driven UI doesn't have to be heavyweight either, any more than HN is.

It's for speed over SSH text is fast. Graphical redrawing of RDP/VNC/whatever is just slower and tedious in the long run.

i am experimenting with TUI/GUI.

My motivation is avoiding all the piles and piles of extra software dependencies that X and/or Wayland bring in.

In addition (but might only be relevant in my niche platform) is that Wayland is buggy and X is deprecated and unmaintained making making the GUI work there a constant struggle.

Time will tell if it is an improvement

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