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Comment by tescreal | Hacker News Reader

Counter proposal: stop making gui, ONLY make TUI.

+ seamless cli integration + network portable + graphics (!!) with modern emulators + always themable + scriptable + works with any navigation modality + you can copy & paste entire segments of your window easily + easy to consistently theme + did i mention entirely network/os transparent? + blazing fast

tongue-in-cheeck mostly, but i assure tfa, the tui serves useful functions. i spend >80% of my time in terminal, and having a pane to do some task a gui would otherwise be needed for is a sheer blessing. being able to essentially move my session to a laptop is wonderful. no mucking with screen sizes or weird X11 wonkery (if you still use x11). what would blow my socks clean off is a tui/gui+gui/tui backend pair so we can have our tui and you can gui it tooie.

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Emacs does that.

If you run an emacs server you can connect to it with an emacs in TTY and one in GUI mode.

Emacs does everything. I want everything to be more like Emacs

I know, me too, which is why I named my cat Emacs! He's awesome.

With ghostel, the terminal experience inside emacs has become fantastic. Vterm was acceptable, but still too slow for me. Combine them with packages such as ultra scroll and emacs reader, I'm having.ore fun than ever in emacs

> i spend >80% of my time in terminal,

My life is spent inside terminal and Emacs. Every time I reach for the mouse, I consider it a major fail. Like: big time failure.

Now at times I'll use the mouse: for example when I'm designing a 3D part to then 3D print to fix something around the house. In that case a mouse makes sense. Or for gaming: a mouse makes sense.

But for most of what I do, even just moving my hand away from the home row position to reach for the mouse is a massive fail.

TUIs and GUIs are both mostly bad for the same reason, you have to learn a new “language” of interaction for with each program, finding the buttons and figuring out how the designer thought the information should be hidden from you.

Stop building user interfaces in general. A command line interface is best. If someone doesn’t want to learn how to talk to the computer, they can ask a chatbot to drive the CLI for them.

Edit: the only TUI anyone should be willing to learn is their text editor, vim or emacs, because that’s fine for 99% of tasks.

Also ncdu. And *top.

> TUIs and GUIs are both mostly bad for the same reason, you have to learn a new “language” of interaction for with each program ... Stop building user interfaces in general. A command line interface is best.

A command-line interface is a "language" like any other. Each tool has its distinctive keywords, many have complex non-standard grammars (e.g., openssl, ffmpeg). And for more complex tools, the learning curve for this language is hilariously steep. I've been using ffmpeg on and off for two decades and I still feel quite helpless with it.

I think your argument makes sense, but it's just an argument for a standardized language, whether that's GUI, TUI, or CLI. Unfortunately, every other program or class of programs tries to innovate in some weird way. There's no reason why switching from Photoshop to GIMP should be so confusing, but it is.

https://arcan-fe.com/ proves you can have all of that and more without having an archaic TUI.

> network portable

They're an absolute torture to work with over a dodgy connection, which often may not even be your fault. Looking at you AWS.

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