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

Anyone old and naiv enough to share this observation: Almost everything I looked at after TurboVision was inspired, but actually not really finished. Once you take the toolkit for a ride, you realize its kind of cute but unfinished. Maybe another way of looking at this is to call many of the TUI frameworks I say "opinionated", whatever that exactly means.

I am likely just dense and uncreative, but the truth is, when I switched from DOS to Linux in the 90s, I was never again as productive as I happened to be with B800. Granted, it likely took me a long time to understand the need for double buffering and the difference between a local/direct text mode vs a terminal, let alone escape sequences. But still. Whenever I tried to do something directly in ncurses, I pretty much gave up due to a distinct feeling of being unhappy. Completely different to what I was able to do with the simple ideal of B800.

I learned GUI programming using win16, then win32 — this would've been during the transition to WinXP. I must have a city-wide blind spot, but every post message pump GUI framework has left me completely befuddled. One thing I never understood was how these OO frameworks helped to really solve the multithreaded UI issues. In Win32, I just threw the main renderer into a thread, then had support renderers build models "on the side", and then updated the difference. The code never really got out of hand.