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Comment by fuzzy2 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, they often lack what we gained over the last decades. Namely navigating with a mouse and being self-explanatory and same-y.

The latter is mostly because certain GUI patterns simply cannot be implemented with a TUI.

And then everyone has their own idea of what keyboard shortcuts should be like. Yuck

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IMHO peak GUI was in 2000s - on Windows most app used Win32 API and apps which followed "Microsoft Windows User Experience" guide had consistent UI/UX. Since then Microsoft introduced many competing frameworks to create GUI all look slightly different and UX is less consistent too. And then Electron come which brought inconsistency of web to the desktop apps.

That is very rose-tinted view of the era. In reality in early 00s lots of software had their own wacky UI toolkits. MS Office is of course the most notable example, but also iirc all of Adobe/Macromedia or every 3d modeling (Lightwave, Maya etc) and audio production software. In the enterprise realm people were doing Java AWT (and later Swing) UIs. And then there were the classics like WinAmp with its iconic theme support, or Mozilla with XUL (and themes).

>Unfortunately, they often lack what we gained over the last decades. Namely navigating with a mouse

For those workflows (as opposed, to say, Photoshop), we could do without that. That's the whole benefit.

>and being self-explanatory and same-y.

GUIs are quite less same-y that TUI. Not to mention the same app GUI can be widely different between 2010 and 2026, whereas any TUIs from 1990s I still use look and work the same.

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