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.

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

> I've tried many IDEs but I'll always come back to vim.

Vim and Emacs both have GUIs. As an Emacs user, I subjectively find the GUI superior - I can e.g. rebind Cmd-S to "save", and that's a reason enough.

> It's a language you learn [...]

You mean the serial lines and ANSI escape codes and termcap? I would say it's more like pidgin with a dozen obscure dialects, and a body language on top. Try writing a portable TUI application from scratch, without touching curses or termbox. <https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/>

Or do you mean, how to drive a TUI application from the keyboard? Here's the painful truth: you can't quit a TUI application without learning it. In vi, it's "Esc-q!-Enter", in Emacs it's "C-x C-c", in screen it's "C-a C-\", in tmux it's "C-a C-d", and so on. Maybe pressing "q" or F10 or C-d will work, but good luck guessing. This is just to quit, and ironically - it's only the start.

By contrast, on macOS it's Cmd-Q; on Windows, it's Alt-F4; and so on. Innovation happens on stable foundations, not by pulling rugs.

> It's not a one size tool for all. There is no product that can be made for everyone. [...] Everyone's dotfiles are as unique as they themselves are.

You know non-TUI applications are also customisable? I have Hammerspoon scripts, a dozen custom keybindings in macOS, .xsession+.Xdefaults+.Xresources, .gitconfig (I use git via Emacs+Magit), various .config/*'s (for e.g. sway), .emacs (bankrupted several times), and so on - none of these are TUI applications.

Or do you mean the command line? I believe we can build a better REPL than a terminal emulator. Emacs is a decent PoC, you can also have a look at Swift Playgrounds. Maybe we can build a generic non-terminal REPL where Ctrl-C means "copy", and Ctrl-V means "paste", that would be a great start.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy if you're happy, I just don't understand the collective obsession. These tools exist, which is great, but we deserve better.

> Here's the painful truth: you can't quit a TUI application without learning it

So what? I'm not so sure you can learn Photoshop without either watching someone use it or reading a few books on it, whilst emacs maintains an excellent tutorial that it tells you to read multiple times when you start it.

In the 1990s and early 2000s I volunteered at a senior center teaching people how to move the mouse and translate that movement into the little arrow-cursors' movement, and the experience convinced me absolutely nothing about computer-use is intuitive or obvious to anyone who did not grow up using it.

I urge you not to stick with a worse-user-experience just because you already "know" it. If you think GUIs are better, that's one thing, but this cannot possibly be the reason.

> Try writing a portable TUI application from scratch, without touching curses or termbox

Try writing a portable X11 application from scratch, without touching libX11 or libxcb.

Try writing a portable Win32 application from scratch, without user32.dll

None of this is fun, but the TUI application is less code, and it's not even close.

> As an Emacs user, I subjectively find the GUI superior - I can e.g. rebind Cmd-S to "save", and that's a reason enough.

The mac Terminal isn't great for a few reasons, but iTerm and kitty absolutely let you do this if you teach Emacs to decode the sequences.

https://github.com/benotn/kkp

I find this a much better experience than using tramp to tunnel remote servers.

> non-terminal REPL where Ctrl-C means "copy", and Ctrl-V means "paste", that would be a great start

You can have this today (see above), but I much prefer ^C being cancel/interrupt/compile, and ^V being make-visible. I avoid copy and paste because it doesn't fit in my workflow very well:

> You know non-TUI applications are also customisable? I have Hammerspoon scripts, ... I just don't understand...

I don't want hotkeys, I want automation.

In a terminal I just run the regular application (like emacs) under autoexpect. I then edit the resulting script, and run it and now I have a new application that does something useful to me. Eventually I add it to an application I wrote which just runs all of my scripts in a big loop.

I run one gui application (chrome), and then use vncsnapshot to dump images that I print out over the kitty image protocol. I then have a perl script forward the keyboard and mouse metrics into qemu via vnc. It works well enough for autoexpect, but it's a lot of work for one application.

Then, I go to the beach while my computer is doing stuff people pay for.