Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

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> Nothing is stopping you from designing a dense and economical GUI.

Then why isn't it done more often? I suspect part of the reason is that most gui frameworks are not really designed for making dense economical interfaces.

> you probably don’t need a user interface on prod. You need a command line interface on prod that

I don't need one, but I often want one. Being able to run vim, htop, etc. on servers is quite useful. Also, it isn't just prod servers. It's also nice to run tuis on VMs and containers that don't have access to graphics.

> I’m not really building applications for other people to use. I’m building them for me. TUI affordances are an awfully big hit to take to get Linux users of programs I don’t even want to publish.

Ok. That's fine. But then why are you trying to convince other people not to make TUIs? If I make an app you find useful, wouldn't you prefer me to make a TUI you can run on your Mac to a linux-only GUI?

> Then why isn't it done more often?

Because it tends to require a lot of thought and effort along totally separate engineering pathways than most of the actual functional coding. Good UI design is not easy, and the skills to do it don't directly overlap with good coding skills. It's hard.

> I suspect part of the reason is that most gui frameworks are not really designed for making dense economical interfaces.

Don't blame the tooling for a broad failing of many developers. It's because constructing a genuinely dense and economical interface for most apps requires considerable time and effort, and frankly, most developers are crap at understanding how users other than themselves use applications. Those that aren't crap at it tend to have worked in large teams with dedicated UX people to help drag them away from their preconceptions.

But TUI's are more likely to have dense, economical, keyboard driven interfaces. Part of that may be the target audience, but I also think TUI Frameworks make it easier to make good keyboard navigation and interactions than most GUI frameworks.

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