You know what's awesome about TUIs? They live in a tab in my terminal. 95% of the time, my system has three windows open: terminal, browser, Signal.
Please, make more TUIs and web apps, so they can live in my terminal or my browser.
Please, make more TUIs and web apps, so they can live in my terminal or my browser.
Once you get the key bindings for screen or tmux thoroughly memorized it's very easy.
I have a windows box that never shuts down and i remote into it and use it GUI mode to do everything you said but with a proper GUI interface. I also use the terminal but your feature (constantly up + resume + multi device) does not need TUIs to even work.
And you present the division of this simple unification of modalities as a benefit, but don't explain why it ought be many.
So far it's all just preference.
I'm not going to deny that the terminal has a ramp, is a lifelong learning curve. But I personally find it much more earnest, much closer to what is really happening, with less intermediation, and the way that terminal conposes with other things is usually unbeatable. TUI for humans, jsonl event sourcing for machine-to-machine.
> drawing on a couple of decades of established UX conventions for how they are displayed
I tend to not just click random apps open. I tend to have done some research and found what options there are on my own. I tend to know what I'm looking for, by the time I'm going to run something. In terms of getting there, finding stuff: the best convention I know of is aptitude, and dselect before it. Both very fine very old tui systems, and clear cuts above any app or web store, imo, for its power, directness, clarity, intent, and script ability.
While a mouse can theoretically use all pixels of a screen, in practical terms a keyboard has a much larger input space than a mouse, and if I can keep both my hands on the keyboard, I can work a lot faster.
At least that's my experience as a (starting) greybeard.
But with a worse UX?
As a devils advocate in response to all the comments claiming TUIs are fine, maybe consider TUIs mostly do not come with many of the advantages of using a terminal CLI app - you can't pipe data into them, out of them, spawn them and collect the output, etc like you can with the usual stuff you run in a terminal.
IOW, they are a reduced functionality of a GUI - resizing works poorly, scrolling works poorly, UI affordances are poor (sure, you can grey out a button, but drag-n-drop hardly ever works between your various terminal tabs, and the smallest UI element is a full character block, unlike a GUI where you can have indicators that are smaller than a character, mini-windows, etc), lack of widgets, etc.
The lightweight argument is not so good either - look at Claude Code, after all. If you want lightweight GUIs, you can do that too.
The only argument that stands is the ssh one, but if working via a remote connection, I'm not going to want a full functionality application anyway - why would I prefer a wordstar/wordperfect interface to a complex document over a GUI interface? For simple documents, sure, TUI all the way, but when I have multiple panes (outline, minimap, status bars, toolbars, etc), it performs poorly in a TUI.
TUIs are making a resurgence, sure, but only in the context of developers and development.
My reaction to this is basically about the same as the fictional Ivan Chesnokov
(beware, crude language, profanity, etc)
Native UIs simply don't have the same flexibility.
Edit to add: I didn't bring my laptop; I'm working from Termux. Surprisingly effective! The code is all in a folder syncing with my phone via SyncThing, so I can try out the sites I'm working on directly on the phone.
So you can't even immediately switch to your app and don't see it in an OS-integrated list?
Terminals are great for CLI. CLI integrated into GUI/TUI is absolutely amazing, but 99% TUI apps do not work like that, they're just awkward crutches foreign to the terminal, so you get no upsides and all downsides. Examples of good CLI integration I regularly use: Kate, Zed, Dolphin, Total Commander, pi. Only one of them is TUI, and honestly it's much worse off with it, since it has to display a ton of formatted text and sometimes pictures. It's really inconvenient and just looks like cargo cult rather than a necessity.
But then a load of others will complain about electron apps.
Further you then have an os within an os. You need to remember to look in your bookmarks, not your start menu. And you're basically throwing away the window manager too.
I want to run web apps in my browser. I understand why Signal isn't a web app, and I'm willing to put up with that for security, but nobody else gets that excuse. Web apps belong in a browser tab.