I don't really get the TUI craze. Would love it if someone has some perspective that I'm lacking.

Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that.

Now, I get that a TUI can look incredibly crisp with proper text rendering, kerning, ligatures, nerd fonts and so on, but still with all that, at the end of the day we still have a thingamajig that implements a VT100. It is a strict subset of what could potentially be drawn with a proper GUI framework.

I understand that TUIs can run over SSH channels, can be juggled with Zellij/tmux/mprocs -- as such they are composable in the sense that they can be used in a way the author(s) didn't think of. It's been a while since I've done any of that personally, and I for one think it's a bit of a cop-out that the Claude Code integration in PyCharm is just the TUI [1] inside a terminal emulator inside my IDE when it could be so much more, just to provide one example.

The article shows off an strace TUI, and it's not like I can't see the benefits of making strace output more browsable. What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.

So what is the appeal? I'm asking in good faith. Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks? Is it the multi-platform aspect?

If all we work in are these super-lean TUIs maybe we don't even need so powerful computers or such high-DPI displays anymore?

I'm genuinely puzzled, but interested to know how TUIs appeal to other people.

1) which, I understand, is itself a React app with a console renderer!

When you get down to it, there is no better way to display text than to use a text display.

No amount of cartoons or colourful bouncy animation of pictures on the screen can replace simply displaying text when what you need to do is display text on the screen. And it turns out that text is a really good way to display information.

A picture is worth a thousand words but why would you use 1000 words when only one or two will do?

My take is that GUI frameworks/APIs have abandoned power users.

Yes, there are things like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this.

Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially for someone who remembers adding a couple of libraries to a Delphi project back in the Office 2000s era and getting full docking, configurable toolbars, etc. with little to no work.

So the easy fallback (especially with the recent proliferation of libraries) is TUI and CLI applications with the layout/docking and tabs provided by the terminal emulator itself or one of tmux/zellij/etc.

I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.

I appreciate TUIs for

- Optimizing for fast, keyboard-only usage

- Allowing me to customize the presentation according to my preferences

- Not having to leave my terminal, where I spend most of my time (I do realize this is something of a chicken-and-egg situation)

> as such they are composable in the sense that they can be used in a way the author(s) didn't think of. It's been a while since I've done any of that personally,

I do this all the time.

One of my favourite applications is a tool called "autoexpect" and I use it every time I try a new program.

What it does is this: I run a program in it's virtual terminal, and it writes a TCL script that does what I did, and puts little regex tests in for the output of that program for me. I can then edit that program (or not: sometimes the first output is fine).

Once upon a time I used to use a program called DESQview: It had a "learn" feature that allowed you to record and playback even DOS programs, so it was very easy to pick up autoexpect.

DESQview/X was their X11 server, and it also had the "learn" feature, but unless the application could be driven entirely by the keyboard, it didn't work; most similar applications I've seen over the decades since need such care for reliable "scripts".

Yes sometimes you also have the possibility of using the GUI accessibility framework to "script" the app. This is barely ok if it works, but most GUIs that I want to script were designed so that would not work at all, and it is coding that requires me work with the app instead of asking a domain expert for a recording.

autoexpect on the other hand is just text, easy to read and modify, and easy to send by email. It is hard to make a terminal application hostile to autoexpect without a great deal of work that (in the text based environment) can usually be undone just by using tmux and mosh on loopback.

> What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.

Modern (as in, since the 1980s) terminals are very capable of multiple fonts and font-sizes. I usually use a non-proportional font for coding myself.

To me they are much better than browser/electron/native gui because they are light on resources, very predictable, portable and honestly they get the job done. I used k8s Lens and it gave the impression of being efficient because of the high density of information, but I haven't felt like I downgraded when I moved to k9s, and now I can manage my clusters, develop their charts using neovim and browse the web without getting dangerously close to filling 16GB of ram. Before with Lens, Pycharm and a browser that would swallow the ram whole and spit its decaying bones to the swap unreasonably often.

TUI returns what GUI lost over the last decades - low latency, low RAM/CPU usage, ability to navigate without a mouse. No one seems to be building nice GUI apps anymore.

You've answered yourself if fourth paragraph. For me (and guessing for many other engineers) usability is more important than crisp visuals..

I personally prefer same font (one I choose) everywhere opposed to "whichever font developer likes for his app).

TUI apps are quick, efficient, portable and usable through ssh. If crisp graphics is the only downside I really don't mind.

For me personally, it's because it retains the same window position, and I get back what I had before when it closes. If GUIs worked more like they did with windows in plan9, I'd definitely use them more

You can also sandbox TUIs, with full control of the sandbox parameters. To do this on macOS, you can use: https://multitui.com

> Is it because the perceived alternative is another run-off-the-mill Electron RAM guzzler, because there aren't any _good_ GUI widget frameworks?

Yeah, I think that is 90% of it. And the whole related ecosystem aspect. All the major ways of building GUIs suck right now, especially for tiny apps. And to further exacerbate the problem, GUI frameworks are generally tied to their programming languages, Qt is C++, SwiftUI is Swift, Flutter is Dart so on; spewing some terminal escapes to stdout is something that can done from basically any language with relative ease.

>Display technology has seen so much progress in the past decades. Apple marketing has taught us about "Retina" displays with pixels so small that you can't tell them apart without a microscope. We get these very rich and colorful desktop environments but we actively decide to not use any of that.

Bypassing all that crap is the main benefit. I don't want any of that superfluous, and ever-changing stuff, when the terminal and, if needed, a TUI, is enough. As a bonus, it works everywhere I can ssh to.

>If all we work in are these super-lean TUIs maybe we don't even need so powerful computers or such high-DPI displays anymore?

For a lot of stuff, you never needed it. For others, like an IDE, DTP, gaming, 3D modelling, video editing, photo editing, they're amazing.

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