> I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.

Claude code is almost there

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/theres-a-react-app-running-...

Considering the insane memory consumption of claude code running in my terminal, electron was never really the problem, bad software was the culprit all along.

Claude code is react and their desktop app is Electron. But “coding is largely a solved problem”.

> shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end

A significant number of these apps are nodejs apps so it’s not that much of a leap!

I really wish that 1Password wasn’t an electron app. Or Spotify. (Maybe I should just use Spotify in the browser).

We need to advocate and evangelize for native apps, like RapidApi on macOS and also Tower.

Just wait till you hear about the wonders of React + Ink! Now you can have JS bloat in your terminal too!

Jokes aside, I don't understand how devs can bring themselves to ship such inefficient apps.

Except most of the TUIs I’m seeing are god awful with horrible input latency because they’ve reimplemented everything from scratch in python or whatever. Multiple hundreds of ms per keystroke: it sucks.

No, it's just misaligned incentives.

Companies make UI/UX to prioritise first 30 minutes of the experience, to keep user using it long enough that they stick with it. Not the 8h/day work the UI will get when a tool become pillar of your work.

> since ages immortal

since time immemorial?

Sometimes I swear that people are just making up acronyms here to troll people.

I assume you mean "orders of magnitude" and not "out of memory". I have never seen the former used as an acronym before, let alone without some kind of contextual clue. (In typical Baader-Meinhof fashion, I'm sure I'll see it again in the next 24 hours...)

I have just combined those together. I use astronvim as main editor but when I need IDE I switch to Idea. I use ideavim with configuration as close as possible to astronvim. So text editing is the same for me in both programs. Modal editors are still great and they can do a lot of work that looks like magic for AI era trained developers.

Did Hiro even use a keyboard? I remember everything was VR in Snow Crash.

I, of course, pretend I'm Zero Cool.

It is much easier to quickly generate a usable tui for simple monitoring and management than a usable gui. Go + lipgloss + bubble tea and a single prompt will give you whatever you need in a minute or two - much faster to compile and no platform specific issues. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window

TUIs already increased in popularity before agents became a thing. The low latency, the ease of remoting and the limited screen real estate which forces the developer to carefully design the interface are genuine advantages. I've been using mutt, vim, tig, tmux, newsboat, etc for over a decade at this point, and the cyberpunk feeling faded quickly.

No it can never be the same. The terminal is about not having to switch from the keyboard. My entire workflow is tmux panes with different TUIs and terminals. Not to mention performance, with a neovim IDE you may have tens of them open in different panes for example. I wouldn't try that with VSCode.

But GUIs are hard to built - mainly because of tech debts around all three major platforms. But nontheless displaying graphics is harder than outputting control chars.

It isn't, at least for me. I choose between GUI and terminal apps based on which one is easies. Sometimes the "easy" option really isn't easy at all.

Hot take: TUI’s default to providing utility, GUI’s are prone to extra style/bloat.

Obviously both are capable of the other.

The vanilla HTML styles look bare, so you have do _something_. TUI’s look sort of cool in their simplest form.

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I would try switching to Auto Mode which is their own recommendation as a safer alternative to that but still avoids needing to confirm actions endlessly: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-auto-mode

CLI makes a lot more sense than TUI to me. A TUI program feels like a new thing to learn, a CLI program is just a new tool in my toolbox.

I can see some point to having an auto-updating dashboard or the like, though.