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

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.

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.

Good GUI apps have shittons of keyboard shortcuts to achieve the same result. The ideal is that the qualified operator keeps their hands on the keyboard for anything that isn't an actual pointing operation. For example, in a video editing app, you can rough-cut with a handful of keys[0] for setting in and out points, jogging through the source material, and inserting into the current active timeline. The keyboard isn't a mere text input device, it's a large-ish macro pad with a huge number of redefineable keys, and it will always be faster to press a button with a known location versus opening a menu and clicking an option by name.

Related: I really liked Blender's text-searchable menus and I wish every GUI app had searchable menus. It's faster than hunting through a static hierarchy. In fact, one of the few criticisms I have of the 4.x era Blender UI is just that it's mildly harder to invoke search.

[0] Which is how linear video edit consoles worked before modern NLEs, mind.

> I wish every GUI app had searchable menus

On macOS and KDE (Wayland), they do! Agreed it's really handy.