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

My big complaint with textual is that it wants to be react. I can see why it would want to be react, that's a very popular framework that a lot of people are already familiar with, but I don't think it's actually a good way of doing user interfaces. But the basic reactive design is a well trod road, and basing your system design on something that's known to work is a great way to derisk the project. Sure, we'll draw some heavy inspiration from react.

Alright, so we're using some bastardization of CSS as well? That might be going a little bit too far. The react model already breaks the idea of CSS in a lot of ways, preferring standardized components. Sure, developers still use CSS to customize components, but I view that more as a side effect of how react evolved rather than as a justifiable architectural choice. But as long as you don't have to use CSS I suppose it's fine.

Last I tried it, you do have to use CSS. There are no good standard components, so you will be making your own, and instead of having components be one nice self encapsulated Python class the standard docs use things like list components and then style them with an external style sheet.

For those reasons textual just isn't for me yet. In python there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do something. By mirroring react so closely they're also mirroring what I see as the JavaScript communities biggest vice.

If you think that react (and FRP in general) is not a good way to build UIs, what is, in your opinion?

I don't agree that React is FRP. FRP is a generic solution that builds data-UI synchronization around data, and assumes that incremental UI updates will be written in UI code. React puts data-UI synchronization code inside UI components and provides an Immediate Mode-like API to avoid writing incremental updates in UI code.