They’re not terminal UIs.

They’re attempts at pretending to have Windows (etc.) GUIs in a terminal.

Same stuff people made for DOS when Windows wasn’t common or good enough yet.

I’m not surprised they’re a disaster. Or built without understanding the abilities of the terminal they’re running on.

sethaurus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you don't want people calling these apps TUIs, what would you prefer people call them? And what does the term TUI refer to, if not this?

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bitwize 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Text User Interface.

	▲	ColonelPhantom 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But what _is_ a "Text User Interface"? Google Images just returns what is being discussed here: "GUIs" that run in some kind of text mode. And to me, that's also what a TUI is. A more textually oriented environment (like a normal Unix shell) is, in my experience, usually referred to as a CLI: Command Line Interface. I did find an interesting hybrid in the Pi coding agent: it seems to leverage the normal terminal scrollback, while still enhancing it with things like transient input fields and status lines, so that it can display those without cluttering scrollback.

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dspillett 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They’re not terminal UIs.

Actually, I think that is close to a good name for them: Terminal-based GUIs.

Some are pretty useful, for instance I like lazygit as a simple dashboard/panel for a small repo (or when making small changes to a larger one), some make me wonder what those who made them were smoking!

The less silly ones are handy when you are tinkering with a far away machine and want something a little more interactive than CLI commands and stuff connected by pipes and scripts but don't want to deal with the latency of GUI remoting. Some, though, are so badly thought out that they are slower than using a browser over long-distance X…

	▲	MBCook 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are useful ones. Something like Midnight Commander can be way better than lots of manual copy and move commands. The kernel config one is way nicer than the stream style kernel configuration tool. Some of these newer ones are starting to feel more like “text mode bling” than useful. My objection to TUI is I don’t think it’s clear enough for what’s happening here. I think you could easily argue that applies to most readline style stream CLI programs. Would you call a fully 3D UI in VR, not a planar in the VR world but true 3D, a GUI? It is graphical by definition. But if you talked to someone about a GUI that’s not what they’d think you’re talking about without additional context. That’s my objection. I think TUI implies way less than what these programs are doing. Yeah it can describe them but I don’t think it should be the word for them.

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kordlessagain 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A shell is the environmental manager, the terminal is the display device, and the window is the container. Add in tabs, web panes and sticky notes + make it all agentic, you get Hyperia: https://hyperia.nuts.services