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

(www.textualize.io)
331 points willm | 3 comments | 11 Aug 24 12:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. mrweasel ◴[11 Aug 24 17:26 UTC] No.41217776[source]▶
It does seems niche at this point. One scenario I can see is where you want something more user friendly than pure CLI and where providing a web UI might be too risky for some reason. A TUI could allow users to SSH in to server somewhere and just have TUI app as their shell. It's a bit contrived I grant you that.

Personally I found Textual a little weird to use, but better than ncurses. Though it didn't really yield what I wanted. I like the old mainframe style TUI application, those already struck me as being wildly efficient.

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2. justinclift ◴[12 Aug 24 01:22 UTC] No.41220440[source]▶
> Personally I found Textual a little weird to use, but better than ncurses.

Out of curiosity, have you looked at it's sibling project "rich"?

https://github.com/Textualize/rich

Seems like it provides a TUI toolkit as well, and it looks a bit less weird than the approach Textual uses.

Was thinking of trying it out with a side project recently, but got pulled onto some other stuff instead so haven't yet started. Nor made the choice between them. ;)

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3. bitvoid ◴[12 Aug 24 03:52 UTC] No.41221041[source]▶
Also, charm's bubbletea framework if you use golang.

https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea