←back to thread

WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

(webtui.ironclad.sh)
321 points IroncladDev | 1 comments | 12 Apr 25 22:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.219s | source
Show context
rollcat ◴[13 Apr 25 06:39 UTC] No.43670593[source]▶
I don't understand the obsession with 1980s terminals. They're even less powerful than the contemporary 8-bit home computers. It's perfectly OK to be a retro enthusiast, it's another thing to claim that this is the peak tech to power our modern CLIs, or a solid foundation for portable UIs.

From the docs:

    Stop thinking in standard CSS units like px, em, rem, %
    Start thinking in Character Cells for spacing, sizing, and positioning
A VT102 already has a character grid, but it needs a serial protocol to allow applications on the mainframe to talk to it. You can loop around this and use the raw mode to address individual cells.

The web browser has an insanely powerful typographic and layout engine. Now we're looping back into character cells. Something went wrong here, at least once.

That said, I like the aesthetic and the default color palette. It's quirky, but it has its places.

replies(13): >>43670672 #>>43670690 #>>43671003 #>>43671094 #>>43671420 #>>43671663 #>>43672234 #>>43673068 #>>43673112 #>>43674448 #>>43675035 #>>43676127 #>>43678300 #
sgt ◴[13 Apr 25 14:29 UTC] No.43673068[source]▶
Occasionally when you see someone using a point of sale terminal that is terminal based, the operator usually flies through the interface like it's nothing.

So there's something to be said about those types of interfaces - it may look simple and be text based, but it's the most user friendly for the qualified operator to get things done.

replies(9): >>43673184 #>>43673437 #>>43674068 #>>43674162 #>>43674856 #>>43675041 #>>43675287 #>>43676230 #>>43715667 #
1. MrJohz ◴[13 Apr 25 19:02 UTC] No.43675041[source]▶
I've definitely seen this in real life, but recently I've started trying to actually watch when people use these interfaces, and they usually seem very slow - lots of hesitation, lots of mistakes, lots of repetition to do very simple actions. I watched someone use a terminal PoS recently and to clear a text input and insert a new value, she had to navigate to the start of the text box (no home key or anything like that), type new characters over the old ones, and then at the end delete any leftover characters from the previous input that they hadn't typed over. In a modern GUI, I would expect the user to have to (1) tab to the text box or press ctrl-A if they were in that text box, then (2) type the value they were interested in, possibly with typeahead support if it makes sense.

My working theory is that these terminal-based UIs aren't quicker because they're terminal-based, but rather users need to learn the keyboard shortcuts because they're so painful to use any other way. A well-designed GUI equivalent could be significantly quicker, and much easier to learn, but nobody wants to pay for that.