Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that.
Now, I get that a TUI can look incredibly crisp with proper text rendering, kerning, ligatures, nerd fonts and so on, but still with all that, at the end of the day we still have a thingamajig that implements a VT100. It is a strict subset of what could potentially be drawn with a proper GUI framework.
I understand that TUIs can run over SSH channels, can be juggled with Zellij/tmux/mprocs -- as such they are composable in the sense that they can be used in a way the author(s) didn't think of. It's been a while since I've done any of that personally, and I for one think it's a bit of a cop-out that the Claude Code integration in PyCharm is just the TUI [1] inside a terminal emulator inside my IDE when it could be so much more, just to provide one example.
The article shows off an strace TUI, and it's not like I can't see the benefits of making strace output more browsable. What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.
So what is the appeal? I'm asking in good faith. Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks? Is it the multi-platform aspect?
If all we work in are these super-lean TUIs maybe we don't even need so powerful computers or such high-DPI displays anymore?
I'm genuinely puzzled, but interested to know how TUIs appeal to other people.
1) which, I understand, is itself a React app with a console renderer!