Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjbzbeiks | Hacker News Reader

Tabs vs spaces.

I’ve always appreciated the positive side of TUIs and appreciated less the positive side of GUIs. I didn’t grow up with a computer at all and in one of my first adult jobs I had to use a TUI at Papa John’s for punching in orders, it was 20x faster than anything I used after it at other restaurants that were GUI driven (keyboard speed wins for me, fit my brain perfectly). I think I learned it in 5 minutes. I was just a normy trying to pay bills.

I dunno why we gotta be insulting to people’s preferences, the article is genuinely bad about this.

View on HN

What you're comparing is really "keyboard-driven" via "mouse-drive".

A GUI can be keyboard-driven and as fast as a TUI. The sad truth is that the status quo for GUIs is absolutely terrible, and most were rushed out and not properly tested to check if they're really usable without a mouse.

> The sad truth is that the status quo for GUIs is absolutely terrible, and most were rushed out and not properly tested to check if they're really usable without a mouse.

This is the key point. No platform UI paradigm focuses on keyboard navigability and speed, all focus on mouse and visual effects for discoverability in a pursuit to dumb down the user experience enough to make it usable for everyone, breaking power users in the process (and increasingly also accessibility stacks).

They used to. OS/2 and Windows both implemented the very keyboard-oriented CUA and focused on that style of use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

I think the real problem is as computers have become more mainstream, they've become more subject to whims of fashion. Consumer-focused companies don't want to be seen wearing last season's UI paradigm. Just watch Apple change things around...

Yes, but GUIs are by default mouse driven, very rarely one can see a keyboard driven one (I haven't seen any).

And TUIs are only keyboard driven. So the choice for speed if you don't need graphics is always - TUI (or CLI).

> very rarely one can see a keyboard driven one

Not so. GUIs absolutely should be keyboard-drivable, if they're written to the human interface specs of whichever platform they're hosted on. That doesn't mean they don't support being mouse-driven or even that mouse isn't the default, but in my experience if the developer has taken any sort of care with the interface then keyboard interaction will be at least as good, if not better, with the keyboard.

> And TUIs are only keyboard driven.

Not true either. There's a line in my .vimrc saying "set mouse-=a" specifically because I want to turn off the mouse in that particular TUI app. If a TUI app doesn't support the mouse they've just not added that support, it's not that it's not possible.

Keyboard-driven GUIs belong in the realm of a lost art called "accessibility", which enabled people with motor issues (amongst many others) to use applications without a mouse.

FWIW, most of Windows XP's utilities and included software was perfectly usable with a keyboard alone.

Emacs is primarily keyboard driven.

Is there a GUI Emacs? I used only TUI one.

> And TUIs are only keyboard driven.

Plenty of TUIs support mouse to various extents too. Claude Code is an obvious example (try the scroll wheel for example).

I agree with you that TUIs are keyboard driven first though - and so you can be certain it will work well.

A lot of GUIs can be muse driven.

The problem is discoverability. You need to go out of your way to learn shortcuts.

> And TUIs are only keyboard driven

Absolutely not.

A TUI is a GUI.

TUI and GUI are a UI.

A GUI requires a lot more work to be keyboard-driven and as fast as a TUI.

No. Maybe web UIs do. However professional GUI libraries like WinForms, WPF, Qt come with a lot of well defined interfaces for activating menu bar, Alt+<key> combos, tab ordering. Just like TUIs, the developer should take time to program them. It is not a lot of work though. Most of the time it is a simple XML config change.

I like TUIs for largely the same reasons as you, but I don't think this is actually a valid criticism of the article. It specifically addresses this by pointing out that you can make your GUI keyboard driven if you want to, so this isn't really an advantage of TUIs per se. It just happens that TUIs tend to be keyboard focussed while GUIs tend to be mouse focussed. But that's a design choice rather than an inherent property of TUIs vs GUIs.

I agree that I found the article to be poorly written. Mainly because it takes a long time to make its point. I didn't really need to see a million examples of the author's vibe coded slop before getting to the topic which the title suggested the article would be about.

> I didn't really need to see a million examples of the author's vibe coded slop before getting to the topic which the title suggested the article would be about.

Agreed. One would hope the article would go into detail of how to make a great GUI (including tips on how to make sure it’s easy to navigate with a keyboard).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com