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

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majormajor 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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

I do a lot of work in the terminal and that's exactly why I'd rather have other windows to the side so that my terminal can stay exactly focused on what I'm doing there. Those other windows might also be terminals, but I have a big screen, and I want to make use of it to see things all at once. A GUI gives far more flexibility for arranging those multiple views.

I've sat with coworkers taking two to twelve keystrokes to flip between things that I just have side by side in separate IDE windows, browser windows, or tabs... or can switch between with a single click instead of those keystrokes.

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kajman 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Window managers are more flexible than multiplexers, but I also think there's a higher floor of effort juggling multiple separate GUI programs than going between tabs and panes in a terminal emulator.

Multi-monitor terminal juggling also probably loses out to GUIs, though for me it's usually IDE or Browser on one and multiplexer on the other. One big zellij session connected to multiple terminal emulators is probably the best way I could think to handle that.

	▲	rmunn 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> a higher floor of effort juggling multiple separate GUI programs than going between tabs and panes in a terminal emulator. Depends very much on your window manager. Tiling window managers such as Hyprland let you open multiple windows and it will automatically arrange them side-by-side. Want one of them to be 60% and the other 40%? No problem, there's a keyboard shortcut (configurable) for that. Have four windows open in a grid arrangement and want to switch between them? Just slide the mouse, no clicking needed so the movement can be as rough and imprecise as you want, OR if you don't want to take your hands off the keyboard then SUPER+arrow keys (also configurable) will move the focus to the next window in that direction. (And if you are in focus-follows-mouse mode then it also moves your mouse cursor to be in the middle of the focused window, so you won't lose window focus by accidentally bumping your mouse and moving it one pixel). Keyboard shortcuts for maximizing and un-maximizing windows, for throwing them onto other workspaces and switching between workspaces... I throw windows around my screen all the time, and rarely take my hands off the keyboard to do it. It's the fastest, most flow-like window manager experience I've found yet.

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pocksuppet 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This used to not be the case - we've regressed. In the distant past you could just drag a couple of widgets onto a form and update them from a timer.

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dbish 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s very easy to do the same thing in a variety of ways and simple guis are basically solved by Claude/codex for almost anything.

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wild_egg 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can get a GUI with the same prompt if you tell it to use TCL/tk instead of Go + Charm stuff

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tempaccount5050 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not anymore it isn't. "Claude, make this a web app".

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allthetime 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Just what I need! A bloated react app to manage my systemd units

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logicprog 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just use something like Tk or wxWidgets.

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tempaccount5050 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So just tell it html only if you want.

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allthetime an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How does the browser interact with the os? A tui exe has direct access. With “only html” now we need a server of some kind. How is multiple layers and running processes superior to a thin terminal based wrapper around the relevant io?

That said, obviously it depends on the use case. I’m not going to make a tui to interact with locations on a map - a web app makes a lot of sense in that case. But something like lazydocker makes sense more sense as a light terminal based program

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sophiabits 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A browser is OOM more expensive to run than a terminal app, regardless of what you're running inside said browser

	▲	vineyardmike 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've literally never met anyone in real life who used a computer that didn't already have a browser running 24/7
	▲	eVeechu7 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Is that because they are much more likely to pay the ultimate price at the hands of the OOM killer?