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Comment by nxobject | Hacker News Reader

> But I think we will swing back to using GUIs when we find a performant way of making them, I don't know what it is yet but surely someone is working on this.

I might be missing something here, but wouldn't any UI toolkit that doesn't live within a WebView work?

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Yes, and of those, my impression is that there are niche ones that look OK, game engines that look great but take a lot of work, and then there's just TUIs, which look retrocool and run blazing fast, and are really easy to write.

> and are really easy to write.

And, sometimes, all you want is to output text.

> and then there's just TUIs, which look retrocool and run blazing fast, and are really easy to write

I mean, I don't even think that's true. Many TUIs are bloated, dogshit slow, and it's not trivial to write complex TUIs without glitches or flickering. The more people start making TUIs because it's the current fad, the worse they will get.

You're probably right. TUIs (being old) have selection bias towards quality. However, my experience writing TUIs is that it's not even the same class of difficulty as writing GUIs. GUIs by any means have way more overhead and learning curve. Not to mention that a TUI is more likely to be immediately CLi compatible via adding a --no-tui flag, or CLI patchable via --tui.

I suppose. I think it depends on your tooling somewhat. I mean, looking at the feature article, Bonsai lets you define TUI elements with an HTML-inspired syntax -- so if you're using that, it's a similar difficulty as writing a web interface, minus starting a server, Electron, or styling stuff yourself. You can just stay in the terminal. That's nice! But if you don't have such facilities and you want something more elaborate than just sequentially printing information, TUIs can be a bit rough.

Ratatui is pretty great. Try it out.

Game engines are no different than web browsers for this use case.

Yes, but there isn't one. Thats why everyone went to shipping v8 & a webview

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