Comment by ofek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ofek | Hacker News Reader

I won't be able to fully test because the interactive prompt gates on the user having an advanced subscription (I already pay $40 a month) which for now doesn't seem to be worth it.

However, the TUI as shown in a post [0] by one of their engineers is quite beautiful. For a moment I thought it was written in Python because it looks similar to Textual [1] but I inspected the binary for my platform [2] and it seems to be written in Rust. I guess Ratatui is quite customizable!

The state of its Windows support is unclear to me. The Bash installer script [3] has a comment on top that says "Windows: run under Git for Windows / MSYS2 Bash (same curl | bash flow); WSL uses the Linux binary." I ran the binary normally in a Nushell session and didn't encounter any issue other than a start-up time that was slower than expected on the first run. Perhaps I would have seen issues had I gotten past the login step.

[0]: https://x.com/skcd42/status/2054993372662915183

[1]: https://github.com/Textualize/textual

[2]: https://storage.googleapis.com/grok-build-public-artifacts/c...

[3]: https://x.ai/cli/install.sh

hey I am the engineer who worked on the TUI and harness and happy to answer your questions.

We worked quite heavily on the TUI, its written in ratatui and we did try to go the extra mile to make sure that there won't be any regressions from moving to an alt-screen rendering. Lots and lots of small details to manage and get correct, we also tried to get vim keybindings correct while keeping it mouse friendly.

Was there a reason you guys went with ratatui? I made one myself but I went with iocraft instead, it has its quirks that are annoying me, might just have Claude reimplement it in ratatui to see the difference...

> (I already pay $40 a month)

As someone who has had Grok since it came out, I used to pay $40 a month, but then I started using Claude more often, I'm on Claude Max since I use it more than the lower subscription can handle. I at one point built my own Grok compatible coding harness, but Grok was underwhelming for me, I have not had the time or energy to burn $$$ just to make Grok work better with my harness, but I'm not spending $300 a month on something my employer will never approve me to use, I'd love to use it but the pricing will have to come drastically down.

> The state of its Windows support is unclear to me.

yeah this one is a bit weird, you can run the linux binary using WSL and that should work. We have a window flavor build but its not as heavily tested yet (we are figuring out a better testing flow for windows)

Thanks for the clarification! I'm sure your team is already aware but Windows users perceive support as native binaries (no WSL) that can run in a normal environment (no Git Bash or Linux utilities).

Agree, I use Windows, Mac and Linux, and work with .NET developers, so primarily Windows devs, some aren't even aware what WSL is.

Wait, why is Windows different? I'm pretty sure you could get it to compile and run consistently across all three platforms, or is this an issue with the TUI?

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