alt Hacker NewsThey’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.
Replies
>They’re not terminal UIs. They’re attempts at pretending to have Windows (etc.) GUIs in a terminal.
That's what a terminal UI is, and has been since Emacs was a thing.
> 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…
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
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?