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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, no.

I don't want to forward a whole desktop environment just because I want to use a small application I have written for myself.

TUIs are much more portable, easier on eyes, can be information dense, and resistant to lassiez-faire UI library changes on platforms. They don't need GPUs to render, megabytes of RAM to run, great amounts of bandwidth to access from afar.

I'll write a library for the functionality, and will slap a TUI on top. You want a GUI, write it yourself. Everything is GPLv3 licensed. You can do whatever you want as long as you respect the license.

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> They don't need GPUs to render, megabytes of RAM to run

They do these days, because you still need a terminal emulator and those are then basically GUIs in themselves. Ain't the 80s anymore :^)

I still have quite a few systems which doesn't have a GUI attached to it, and I access them via a pure console.

Most, if not all these systems have Matrox G200 or similar low end 2D integrated graphics which are just there to see the text during boot, nothing else. I sometimes SSH from these systems to my own systems to use TUI or CLI tools.

If I want to go a step further. We have a couple of real VT320s.

Working at a datacenter has it perks, it seems. :^)

> We have a couple of real VT320s.

That's awesome, I have one too and I fell in love with it. I fixed up the old gif320 program to run properly on modern machines a while ago and made a C# port too:

https://github.com/ldyeax/gif320

https://github.com/ldyeax/Gif320Sharp/

How do you deal with modern programs not respecting TERM/LANG capabilities? I found even using man pages on my machine would sometimes result in the terminal getting caught up on some invalid byte sequence emitted from some unicode that snuck its way through or such.

I ended up writing a program I called VT320 Translator, or vt320t for the name of the binary, which in broad strokes runs your target program in a background terminal and sends curated updates to the VT320 while passing through keyboard input. (You can kind of approximate this with just screen and some other things but it doesn't end up being very good IME) This lets me do some neat things like translate unicode characters into DRCS (Dynamically Redefined Character Set) sequences that you can actually see on the VT320, use optimized heuristics for screen updates tuned to the exact hardware, etc.

At the core is a vtparse-based VT320 emulator that strives to be as accurate as possible with an accompanying diff generator from one emulator state to another. If you're interested I could get into more of what I've done here and even get the code onto my github - it's been private for a while because it's being used in an upcoming game demo but I could easily separate out the non-game-related parts that make up vt320t.

Yeah, these terminals are something else. They are built like tanks and they just run. Also congrats on fixing up gif320 and developing vt320t. This is how old systems got preserved. I recently learned that a PDP-10 I have a photo of has been transported to a museum and restored to running condition. This is the second good news which made me really happy.

If it's not a problem, can you share the vt320t source code on GitHub, if not you can share it privately and it can stay between us. I'm not in gamedev, even remotely, so the game parts has no utility for me. It's completely up to you. I'd love to read some low level code talking with vintage hardware. You can find my contact information at my homepage, which is on my profile.

On the other hand, our VT320s doesn't do anything fancy these days. We generally use it to talk with our networking devices like switches and routers over RS232 since they can communicate really well with each other. While we have lots of hardware to tend and projects to run, maybe I can hook-up one of the VT320s to something for fun.

Thanks for your lovely comment and spending time for all of these. It's greatly appreciated here.

Oh, also your homepage is great. I liked it a lot.

https://github.com/ldyeax/TerminalEmuSuite/blob/main/README....

Here you go, just finished getting it all together. I do plan to add the game stuff here relatively soon - I'm just saving it for a certain demo to be released, but I did include a screenshot, as well as some pictures of vt320t running with real hardware.

> Oh, also your homepage is great. I liked it a lot.

Oh, thank you! I'm probably even going to put a WebGL/whatever Unity exports to these days for web up there when I can so the terminal emulator can be used on there.

Thanks a lot for this, I'll be diving in!

Cheers!

TUIs also live where the rest of the interesting stuff happens, in the terninal. They don't force you to move to a different env

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