This is because of the failure of the modern GUI environment.

They want a GUI, but, instead, they have to resort to something like this. A GUI in a TUI.

They want something portable. They want something that can run remotely. They want something they can run more safely than having to expose a socket. They don't want to have to bring up an entire desktop.

Rootless windows are effectively dead. That leaves web interfaces (and all of their issues) or doing a TUI, where all you need is an SSH connection that everyone already has.

In the past you could slap something together with Tcl/Tk, and just launch the window over X Windows. That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

The LCD is SSH, and these are the only things that fit.

> That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

I was quite recently, but even then remote X is missing a really big usability piece: keeping a long-running application open on the host and periodically connecting to it from a remote node (concretely: connecting to my server from my laptop). VNC/RDP/etc all do this at the desktop level, but they're pretty mediocre experience-wise.

tmux gives me this for terminal applications without really any compromises. I run tmux for local terminals as well as remote terminals; the hotkeys are all deep muscle memory at this point. It just works.

Agreed. I dread GUI development, hence I never build GUIs. If there were a library for my language of choice that worked multi-platform and used native components then I’d be interested.

> That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.

If you:

1. Have a low-latency connection to a decent machine, and 2. Are on a machine that's weak, or isn't yours, or that you don't fully control (e.g. employer forces you to run Windows)

... then you live in remote X apps my friend.