Being cheeky here, but how many terminal emulators and multiplexers do we need?

What is driving the Cambrian explosion of CLI tools in the last ~5 years?

I’ve been using Linux since 2001 and use standard Konsole on zsh. I have a graphical desktop environment to deal with windows and showing pictures alongside them. Is it perhaps because I am an Emacs person that all I need exist within its loving embrace?

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orbital-decay a day ago | parent | next [-]

TUI got back into fashion and it seems like everyone is trying hard to reinvent GUI in a really roundabout way, like hacking Braille to display graphs. I think the circle will be complete with the support for proportional fonts for readability, like in Emacs. Character sizing is already (kind of) a thing, which ridiculously enables Markdown rendering in a terminal.

Man, I really want a proper GUI framework with this kind of energy behind it.

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sph a day ago | parent [-]

A look at the VT100 standard was enough for me to decide building "modern" GUIs on top of that is truly the definition of madness and bloat.

Why go through all that effort and leaky abstractions to display GUIs when you can just bitblt pixels from memory to a framebuffer directly?

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iamnothere a day ago | parent | next [-]

Aesthetics, running TUI tools headless over SSH, zero possibility of Electron (although I’ve seen TUI tools written in node which is almost as bad), no worries about X/Wayland jankiness.

Frameworks like bubbletea make it very easy these days.

I think there’s a limit though, a good TUI shouldn’t be “modern”, it should be like the old TUIs that ran auto shops and accounting systems. TUIs that are information dense, keyboard-driven, and snappy are hard to beat.

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orbital-decay a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know, I have too many tools that would really benefit from using GUI (e.g. coding agents, process monitors) but are using TUI and are written in TS instead. Everything about TUI screams jank to me, even the old kind. Both internals and presentation. It's less readable, way more limited, just about everything in it is bad, maybe except the ability to mix it with the CLI programs, but it's quite niche and you could do it the other way in the GUI (embed a terminal, like many apps like Zed or Total Commander do). And of course there's absolutely nothing that stops anyone from developing information-dense, keyboard-driven, and snappy GUI apps that run headless.

	▲	iamnothere a day ago \| parent [-]
		> there's absolutely nothing that stops anyone from developing information-dense, keyboard-driven, and snappy GUI apps that run headless. This is true, and yet... For some reason GUI seems to attract bloat, excessive margins/padding, and sloppy practices. Maybe it’s just that web views are too tempting to resist.

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sph a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I figure we can do more "information dense" than 80x25 Unicode characters, or marginally more than that, these days.

	▲	iamnothere a day ago \| parent [-]
		Set a smaller font on your terminal emulator, done. Good TUI apps are responsive and resize to fill larger spaces.

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throw-the-towel 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Constraints make the artist's job easier. In this case, the constraint is the character grid.

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aaplok a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I contend that this is natural evolution. Every GUI app is a browser nowadays, and that leaves a niche for leaner apps to fill. This is what TUI apps seem to be doing.

Cross platform GUI is hard unless you elect to build a website and navigate through chrome via electron. Cross platform TUI is a lot easier.

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throw-the-towel 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And for some reason, all of the neo-terminals have gone jihad on native tabs.

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blakeashleyjr a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Please don't do anything to slow this down. Another TUI or multiplexer doesn't hurt anyone and only serves to bring new ideas to the table.

I for one have used Zellij every day for years and would struggle to get by without it!