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320 points IroncladDev | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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imiric ◴[] No.43671000[source]
Ah, wonderful. It even mimics the empty rectangles when a font doesn't contain a glyph...

This is neat, but no, stop it. TUIs are an abomination of design that poorly mimic actually beautiful UIs. They look the way they do because of inherent constraints of the terminal, not because their authors particularly wanted them to look like that. So bringing that design language to a platform that does support rich UIs is artificially limiting what can be done on the web. It will also never truly have the same design as the terminal, unless you also want to avoid having any rich multimedia, interactivity, or use any web functionality introduced after 1995. At that point, your users would be better served by a text-only or Gemini site instead.

As an aside, I think TUIs are wrong in most cases. If you're building something like a text editor or process manager, sure, they have their place. Although even then I would argue that they shouldn't mimic the look and feel of GUIs, but be purpose-built for the app in question. But most terminal programs shouldn't use TUIs. They should accept command-line arguments to modify their behavior, run and do what the user asked, and then exit. This is how you make programs adaptable, composable, and scriptable. They can still be made interactive at runtime via a different e.g. "client" program, but forcing the user to manually interact with an interface that mimics GUIs is an awful experience.

replies(4): >>43671037 #>>43671146 #>>43671155 #>>43671324 #
1. eMPee584 ◴[] No.43671155[source]
TUIs are memory-friendly tools for complex tasks and have a different UX feel (can be more comfortable, clear & informative, accessible) to pure CLI or native/web apps. I for one am extremely happy there's a thriving terminal ecosystem, nowadays with colors, icons (nerdfonts), emojis, mouse support, widget layouts.. even sixels and smooth scrolling..