I wish we had a "cool" GUI toolkit. GUIs are way better at this stuff. Adding point and click is so close to being a GUI, the only possible reason this is a TUI is fashion.
Imgui is also good for this
I appreciate the tui.
TUIs can have GUI like affordances UX/UI wise regardless of if they use the terminal as the contract or a window server/gui lib
A GUI app could be a non-bloated, self-contained binary too. There's nothing intrinsic to GUIs that prevent this. TUIs are, after all, just GUIs that use text characters instead of pixels.
> that can run on windowless server envirorments just fine
Who cares? Who runs without a graphical window manager? Kubernetes is from the ground up a network application. The entire point is you don't SSH into nodes any more, you run management tools from completely separate computers that have window managers. The fact you can run stuff like this in a text console is nothing more than a novelty and a curiosity in 2026. I guarantee almost everyone running this will be running it in a terminal emulator in a WM.
> TUIs can have GUI like affordances UX/UI wise regardless of if they use the terminal as the contract or a window server/gui lib
Yeah, but it's slow and cumbersome compared to a GUI and it's an incredibly inefficient use of the thousands of pixels available on a modern screen.
we need more experiments with X11 interfaces
- Easy efficient remote access. Pixel streaming and things like GTK Broadway are out. Needs a proper protocol/standard that would send styling-neutral primitives (and that is not X11 forwarding), and the entire toolkit architecture built around that. Something like SPICE/QXL but more semantics-aware? Not sure, might be too low level and chatty.
- Staying in the terminal. This is a matter of window management, though a toolkit can offer good defaults so this doesn't feel janky.
- Keyboard-first. Trivial. "GUI is for filthy mouse casuals" is a ludicrous idea.
- Low bloat. Web and things like GTK Broadway are out.
I haven't seen two similar opinions on actual architecture and stack, however being available in Rust will be a great start.
Imagine something that looks cool like a TUI, but has pixel perfect graphics and typography where useful, is as fast and functional as Windows 98, but is still tiny, and can be entirely keyboard driven if you prefer that (which I do). We can have all of this today.
A sibling comment has shown a GUI toolkit that I think would be considered cool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010671