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

(webtui.ironclad.sh)
320 points IroncladDev | 2 comments | 12 Apr 25 22:02 UTC | HN request time: 1.174s | source
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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.

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godelski ◴[13 Apr 25 08:08 UTC] No.43671003[source]▶
The obsession is because it is still the best. For all its faults, I'm still terminally terminal. The beauty of it is in the utility and how it becomes so natural. It's a language you learn that gives you so much freedom you cannot find anywhere else. I've tried many IDEs but I'll always come back to vim. It might have taken time to learn but this is true for anything else. I didn't learn a tool, I learned a language. I didn't learn to run, I learned how to move my legs. With that I could teach myself, I can walk, I can run, I can jump, I can dance, I can be anything I want to be. In VSCode I can walk, hell I might even be able to run, but there is no dance, there is no "me".

That's the beauty of the terminal. It's not a one size tool for all. There is no product that can be made for everyone. Instead it's an environment for you to craft and live in. Everyone's dotfiles are as unique as they themselves are. That's the point. Because when you can't build something for everybody you give them the means to craft their own worlds. The computer didn't become so great because the chips, it was the ability to write software and build the things you need. The smartphone didn't take off because it had a big screen, it did because the app. Because you could create. Because your phone is yours and no other phone is like it.

But I haven't found a browser that lets me be me. That let's me dance around the web and jump and be free. And I fear we lost sight of this thing as it became so natural, that the phone and computer are turning into things that be instead of a reflection of me

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sgarland ◴[13 Apr 25 13:39 UTC] No.43672734[source]▶
What a lovely sentiment. Fully agree; staying in the terminal for as much as possible makes for far less friction when context-switching.
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jampekka ◴[13 Apr 25 13:56 UTC] No.43672835[source]▶
Text-based interfaces can be done with techniques other than simulating a very restricted device from 1978.
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godelski ◴[13 Apr 25 18:28 UTC] No.43674794[source]▶
If your terminal is from the 70's you really should get with the times. Check out ghostty or something because things are very different these days
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1. jampekka ◴[14 Apr 25 21:02 UTC] No.43686310[source]▶
Ghostty seems to support a subset of the xterm protocol. Sure, a bit more advanced than VT100, but still it still is, as the ghostty dev puts it, "very often touted as the gold standard for historical terminal behavior."

https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-devlog-005

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2. godelski ◴[15 Apr 25 02:11 UTC] No.43688361[source]▶
I think you're reading things with the intent to support your conclusion rather than with intent to understand what is being communicated. Including the basic fact that xterm is itself an improvement upon VT100.

Ghostty matching and supporting xterm protocol is different than it /being/ xterm and thus /being/ functionally identical to your 70's terminal. Of course it needs to be able to support this protocol because why would someone building a terminal emulator build something that is going to break as soon as you touch something that tries to communicate via an xterm protocol? There's a reason there's that ssh stuff at the end. Are you going to criticize a browser for supporting html and css?

But I don't get your point here. Why would that even matter? You're hyper fixating on the similarity to the 70's terminal while blatantly ignoring everything that is different.

  Does your 70's terminal:
    - Support tabs?
    - Support panes?
    - Handle mouse clicks?
    - Support non-ansii fonts?
      - Colors?
      - Ligatures?
      - Glyphs and Icons? Emojis?
      - Support asian language input?
    - Use GPU acceleration?
    - Support shaders?
    - Render high resolution images?
    - Render the terminal at hundreds or thousands of fps?
Your 70's terminal can't even do window resizing, let alone accurately render that. Then comparing it to something that realistically could run 4k videos in it. Go look at the notcurses demo[0]. I'd love to see your 70's terminal do anything close to that.

I mean what do you want? In my terminal I can write my code, have full color support, view PDFs, view high resolution images, and do all this without really putting any meaningful stress on my system. I can have a bunch of tabs open viewing code, pdfs, images, several instances of gdb and still be using less CPU and memory than if I just open VSCode.

So what point are you trying to make? That I interact with you program mainly with the keyboard and that despite being able to use my mouse I choose not to? Or are you just mad at the aesthetics? Or that people haven't exploited the previously mentioned capabilities to build cooler things?

Honestly, I do not understand what point you are trying to make.

[0] https://notcurses.com/