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Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

(www.textualize.io)
331 points willm | 2 comments | 11 Aug 24 12:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bogdan-lab ◴[11 Aug 24 17:00 UTC] No.41217590[source]▶
This TUI looks pretty, but I cannot imagine situation, when I would actually use it and be ready to pay for it. Probably I am not living in a right environment for it. But in my experience, either people are happy with something truly minimalistic or they try to please a user with GUI right away.

For example, YouTube link in the article showed a possibility to display table with highlighting cells. Why would I need that as TUI? Probably if I want to navigate through table with highlighting active cell I would also need a bunch of other stuff and eventually I would need a proper GUI.

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1. seeknotfind ◴[11 Aug 24 17:11 UTC] No.41217671[source]▶
One reason to prefer textual UIs is that you can use them from any computer anywhere fast (no slow video VNC). Also, if you are already using a terminal, then improving that experience is nice. There is a big enough market there for this company.

However, I'm not sure what a "proper" GUI is. Terminals have a widely used open standard. These protocols are more standard and interoperable than any GUI framework, and they are supported on every system. Once you add video in there, close a few more gaps, I think competing with the browser, or bringing the full computer experience to the terminal is reasonable.

Obviously if terminals add something like video, it's "copying" rendering pipelines from "proper" GUIs, but making the terminal experience better, which could also be viewed as bringing UNIX zen to GUIs, if it makes it big, you'll love it too! <3

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2. sam1r ◴[12 Aug 24 00:37 UTC] No.41220263[source]▶
Or what if you just prefer to not use a browser to get your information on the internet. Textualize is like the only choice I can jump to.

It’s much better to hyperlink and open image and video in the browser from the terminal. In my opinion. Playing it would just block your terminal session, so it’s pretty annoying to have to open another tab with an inline video playing. I am happy with the features with textualize and haven’t even thought about needing things that play over a duration beyond a few seconds.

Textualize then becomes the browser api that I build my terminal browser and render only the components I care about.

None of that background or js libraries, ads. It’s well worth it.