""GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, ""

? The GUI has nothing to do with that.

If you use Chat / Work / Code <- that's the differentiation.

So 'Code' in 'Gui' is identical to Claude Code except for the visual layout.

If you use Work or Chat, which are not optimized for Coding you'll see a different experience.

If you use iTerm or Ghostty and set a key combo to switch tabs you can very easily switch between tabs and the TUI generally gives more dense information.

Usually people migrate to TUI not the other way around.

I think that there are reasons to use GUI - if there is deeper integration with Git or an issue tracker - or - in VSCode - for navigating files etc. - definitely those things are valid.

But for raw AI the getting a TUI to work the way you want it is ideal.

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miki123211 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't get why people love TUIs so much. They're basically GUIs made using inferior tools. Why hammer in a nail using your fist if you have a hammer handy?

A GUI is strictly more powerful than a TUI (because a GUI could just show plain text in cases where that is the most appropriate mode of interaction, E.G. Bloomberg, AMadeus), but it could also do so much more in cases where it is not.

I do love terminals, don't get me wrong. When what you're interacting with is CLIs and Unix tools in a shell, a terminal is exactly what you want. I do love the Unix philosophy, I like small and composable tools that you can use together, and I think the interactive way of working that a shell or REPL can give you is great (though notebooks would have been better, but that's beside the point). Those are things that the terminal shines at. Pretending to be a GUI is not one of those things.

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barnabee 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Most GUIs are designed in a way that I dislike. It’s true that terminals lack power compared to GUIs, and some GUI apps (Bloomberg, Blender, …) are reasonably well designed for their use case, but most GUIs are such a disaster that it’s almost more fun interacting with them via curl to an API or SQL directly to a database.

The other problem is that all the GUI apps look different. I really want one extremely powerful, composable GUI “framework” that all apps sit within. Ideally I could even decompose and recombine parts of different apps into new tools or workspaces.

Now that anyone can build a GUI by prompting LLMs, maybe we’ll get actually good GUIs, or at least be able to build our own, but up to now the direction of travel has been disappointing to say the least.

	▲	orbital-decay 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Most agentic UIs are structured exactly the same regardless of the interface. TUIs are not composable in any possible meaning of that word (unlike CLI/REPL), they are GUIs on a fixed cell grid.

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

A couple of reasons

1. Lower resource consumption (ram, binary size)

2. Usable over the network (ssh)

3. Often much easier to drive with automation software (agents/scripts)

4. Ui tends to be dense, matches your font perferences

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

Terminals are 'activity dense' and usually have a lot of key cusotmizations.

You can't even have 'tabs' inside of Claude Desktop, which is a dealbreaker for most power users.

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

One benefit is that they're easy to use remotely over SSH or in a VM, but I agree that a local, native GUI is generally better than a TUI.

	▲	fauigerzigerk 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You can use VSCode over SSH as well.

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

It's because you can ssh into something and VNC sucks.

GUIs are great when you're sitting in front of the computer it's running on. Trying to do anything remotely with them is terrible. RDP is pretty great at making that experience suck less tho.

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

Are you saying I should go back to GUI? I just feel it’s so awkward. I have LazyVim for more advanced review, Hunk, etc… the GUI is like a inferior version of Eclipse IDE or something. Or it used to be, atleast.

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queenkjuul 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Personally the Claude Code TUI also sucked every time i used it. Scrollback bugs in IDEA embedded shells, extraneous output vs the VSCode extension, and unreliable links to source code.

Isn't the CC TUI written in React?? I mean my web dev "all i have is this hammer" brain is intrigued, but surely, there's better things to do? Like you said, the terminal is great for piping inputs and outputs, for scripting, for bulk operations. It's really not great for real time interaction across many files, which is how i use CC and kind of wonder how you would use it any other way. (I guess if you literally just prompt and pray, the UI literally doesn't matter?)