yesterday at 10:48 PM
The article has it backwards: GUIs are the third way of using Linux. TUIs are the 2nd way. I mean, stuff like pico, nano, vi, Emacs - these are all TUIs.
Perhaps it's because I grew up on DOS that I think that way, but one of the reasons I switched from Windows to Linux decades ago was to use TUIs.
yesterday at 11:18 PM
All the TUI stuff you can leave running in tmux and then have a consistent workspace remotely accessible from your PC or phone is indeed really nice. IRC, mail, torrents, notetaking, etc.
yesterday at 11:09 PM
As far as I remember, when I wrote my email reader/writer in C, ncurses was not even a thing, so I made my own windows and dialogs in text mode with VT-something codes or something like that. That was not on Linux, but on DOS at the time, but anyway. I did not wait for graphical stuff to be common.
I used my software for months to read and write mails, interact in mailing lists, newsgroups, etc.
Funny thing is when a sysop sent me a mail once: basically, he said to me that one of the machines he had the responsibility of back then warned him about a non-conform header. He asked me the name of the email software I was using to report the bug to the author. I thanked him for my first report ever, for his diligency, etc. and of course, I fixed it promptly ;)
yesterday at 10:03 PM
I stick to CLI's and TUI's and use zellij as my window manager. This way the configs and muscle memory I develop on my work macbook are transferrable to the linux box I use for personal projects, and visa versa.
It seemed a bit limiting at first, but after adapting to it I feel like it was the right move. GUI's represent a sort of explosion in the set of valid states for software to be in, and I find that software which opts out of trying to support that explosion tends to work better, likely because the maintainer just has less to worry about.
yesterday at 10:45 PM
Try herdr. I ama tmux then zellij switcher and love it once you minimize the ai crap
yesterday at 10:55 PM
Any particular reason to try herdr?
yesterday at 9:39 PM
Emacs text interface, Emacs GUI interface, and ... sorry what's the third one? :-)
yesterday at 11:21 PM
When I read:
> What we've never seen is a unifying system that treated the TUI itself as the primary user experience.
I immediately thought 'this person has never heard of Emacs'. And my heart ached with pity.
yesterday at 10:35 PM
The only one that matters, Emacs in evil mode.
yesterday at 10:54 PM
Emacs Window management via exwm.
yesterday at 9:44 PM
ghostty running ssh w/ emacsclient connected to emacs daemon running ghostel
yesterday at 10:23 PM
why would one use the madness of adhoc tuis instead of emacs, I'll never know.
yesterday at 10:12 PM
yesterday at 10:28 PM
Emacs in ed mode, but you list them in the opposite order from the article.
yesterday at 11:41 PM
> What we've never seen is a unifying system that treated the TUI itself as the primary user experience.
Do things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview from way-back-when not count? I've seen more modern systems trying to do similar though they rarely offer enough beyond tmux+byubo, tough state plans to, so don't get much traction and drop into being unmaintained before getting to the point of being stable.
yesterday at 11:46 PM
Not a new idea, but a REALLY GOOD ONE.
I'd settle for a first class terminal+file manager combo setup, like where both are respected equally. Dolphin can kind of do it one way, geany the other?
yesterday at 9:46 PM
Like the days of Norton Commander
yesterday at 11:07 PM
Or Z-19 terminals... green screen, 80 char lines of text. Lightning fast 1200 baud modem!! Those were the days :-)
yesterday at 10:22 PM
Other ways I often use:
- Using a web browser to connect to a web app running in a Linux VM. I write all my custom tools that way.
- Using VS Code to connect remotely, using ssh
yesterday at 11:34 PM
What a ridiculous article. TUI is GUI with fixed cells, that's it.
yesterday at 10:44 PM
I'm exploring aspects of these "other ways". I've been pushing Kitty terminal graphics compositing and then layering libraries over that. I've also been working on remoting Golang programs over the network as well as compiling them to WASM and embedding that in browsers. This WebGPU browser shader is an example of that mashed together [1]. Same code for native and browser.
Shout out to TUIOS [2] that is in the article; author has a lot of neat libraries and his `sip` protocol is the basis of that remoting work.
[1] https://nimblemarkets.github.io/ntcharts/demos/shaders/
[2] https://github.com/Gaurav-Gosain/tuios
yesterday at 10:12 PM
I was hoping the third way would be somehow related to a type of hands-free neuralink so I can code at the speed of thought with my eyes closed laying in bed. Someday the tech will exist but, by then I'm not sure coding will be a thing to do anymore. I'll probably still do it anyway though.
yesterday at 9:28 PM
Early Reuters and Bloomberg terminals had a text-centric aesthetic.
AFAIK on a PC, when booted into text-only mode, you are still using a bit-mapped framebuffer. From my experiments you can mix graphics and text.
yesterday at 10:29 PM
PC is the weird exception in having a character mode at all for compatibility reasons. every other platform does the character mapping in software.
yesterday at 10:27 PM
> What gives you the benefit of a visual interface, without the bloat that comes with Wayland or X11?
fbdev?
yesterday at 9:53 PM
Well, if we count claude as tui.
yesterday at 11:41 PM
If you were poor in 1993 and could only afford Unix shell-account, all this was very necessary. Nowadays little bit esoteric.
Albeit. I was using tmux on termux, until somebody pointed out you can get new terminal screens by swiping from right (corr. from left).
yesterday at 9:41 PM
Ah yes, website talks about "the bloat of x11 and Wayland", and doesn't even scroll correctly on Firefox mobile likely due to some JavaScript fuckery.
Practice what you preach. And practice first.
yesterday at 10:06 PM
Not JavaScript in this case, just CSS bloat (backdrop-filter).
yesterday at 11:01 PM
another comment on a different HN thread pointed out a similar issue. Now I'm wondering if backdrop-filter can be used correctly at all or should just be avoided entirely
yesterday at 9:44 PM
Scrolling is pretty bad on Firefox desktop as well. So bad that I didn't want to finish the article.
Why do people do this?
yesterday at 10:28 PM
What do you mean by "pretty bad"? I'm on Zen (Firefox based) and the scrolling seems to work fine. But maybe it's getting resource constrained on some hardware.
yesterday at 10:26 PM
Weird. I can't reproduce the slowness you guys experience with fennec nor ironfox.
yesterday at 10:09 PM
They only tested in Chrome.
yesterday at 9:46 PM
yesterday at 10:24 PM
I guess the site scrolls smoothly in a TUI browser?
yesterday at 10:33 PM
which, wierdly enough I am useing, and the site scrolls just fine,my browswr has NO java script, No Dom storage, no images/video displayed though there are a few websites that have some kind of alternate way to display images in short video loops that auto play
edit:videos are mp4's
yesterday at 9:57 PM
I don't see any suspicious JS on the page, so I suspect it's a styling issue triggering some inefficiency in Firefox. There are animations and text-shadows.
yesterday at 11:35 PM
Looking at tuios, using a mouse in a TUI completely defeats its purpose, for me personally.
yesterday at 11:46 PM
I'm making a winamp clone in the tui. Using a mouse in that scenario makes perfect sense. Using a phone touch screen - even more.
We are reaching the point where a terminal tui is a viable and even sensible alternative for certain apps.
yesterday at 9:57 PM
Isn’t that what resolution aware ttys and screen accomplish?
yesterday at 11:48 PM
everybody lately is talking about TUIs. what do these people mean?
(I trace my adult involvement with computers back to (a) terminals and (b) where you didn't know if your terminal and terminal driver would support ANSI cursor positioning (stty raw!) so I feel equipped to understand what people are talking about, I just don't know.)
is emacs a tui? is midnight commander a tui? vi? I assume the cli is not a tui? are we not even talking about terminals?