Stop Making TUIs

Do more TUIs. Please.

I agree with the author, as long as you keep the good bits of TUIs, i.e. keyboard driven and fast. There is absolutely no reason why a GUI shouldn't be strictly better than a TUI.

I'll just copy a comment I made about this in another thread:

TUIs are just GUIs that use a grid of characters instead of pixels. They are strictly worse than true GUIs, by definition. The only thing I liked TUIs for is running over SSH, but can any of these newer ones really run over SSH with any kind of decent performance anyway?

I think people are confused and think they like TUIs because they like them being keyboard driven etc. But this could all be done with a GUI.

The other factor is probably just fashion. Similar to how some kids are now listening to music on cassette tapes, which are objectively worse than other media in almost all respects. The less cynical take is it's like vinyl: it does come with compromises but gives us back some of the things we lost over the years.

The actual interesting text-based interface is the CLI. I've seen a few examples of TUIs that really should be a CLI and would be much more useful as such.

The typical TUI fan is a nerd with no clue about typography so therefore they don't notice any problem with being shown elements that have no reason to be monospaced in monospace.

i.e. ignorance is bliss in the world of typography.

this blog post is mostly shadowboxing and showing off their llm-made software; kind of disappointing

No.

This reeks of AI slop.

> Our field has a weird relationship with terminal and command line interfaces. The time has come to re-evaluate it.

Why? Why is infatuation weird? Why should we reevaluate it? The whole premise sounds like a "give me a hot take on XYZ".

(I built itter.sh so I'm biased)

"Stop liking things I don't like!!"

Just adding in my perspective:

TUIs, at least to me and some friends in my circles, do something that native applications don’t: demand focus from the user.

Sure, modern terminals and TTY environments have visual tabs and virtual terminals that let you quickly toggle between multiple apps, and you can of course manually code your screen to split apps across a single “window” if you really want to get into the guts of things.

But for several folks in my close circles (myself included), the fact that each TUI occupies an entire screen by default, forces us to focus on what’s going on and what tasks we’re trying to accomplish in a way native UIs don’t. On the desktop I can flit between Discord and Telegram and multiple games and several Firefox windows full of tabs and the video encode I’m working on and hey did that bank transaction go through let’s check my email except UGH music streaming went off the rails so let me go back to my client and-

You get the idea. For folks who lack the neurotransmitters to maintain consistent focus or wave off distractions, a terminal environment acts as an accessibility device in and of itself. btop on 1, irssi on 2, Hermes (Qwen 35B) on 3, with 4 as my primary workspace and 5 as a fallback. Simple. Clean. Efficient. Lightweight.

I generally concur with the author that we should be “summoning” (I love that word for reasons that deserve their own essay/comment) more native UI apps that are as information-dense as, well, Bloomberg Terminal. There’s no reason we can’t build something as powerful and focused for the everyman for, say, inventory collections, or K8s constructs, or network architecture, all in a native UI. There’s nothing wrong with the GUI, only that at some point we let ourselves get suckered for the narrative that GUIs have to be easy, simple, and opaque, as opposed to transparent and (logically) complex. We can and should build GUIs that flow logically like the commands they’re executing behind the scenes; hell, we should be able to open a console log of every action we took in the GUI and the associated command(s) it executed, so we can better learn to transpose from GUI to CLI ourselves and build more capable or complex automations.

GUI isn’t bad. TUI isn’t bad. What’s bad is presuming one or the other is superior to everything (or for everyone) else, or worse, assuming one cannot function in a given way comparable or equivalent to the other.

Old man yells at terminal.

Who tf cares about what the author who appears to be new to building native desktop apps (and vibe codes them) says about terminal apps?

I am not writing my code 3 times for each native platform even for agents and then dealing with signing keys just for it to break on a OS update. Terminal apps for developers survive all of this.

The entire article is just a massive rant with woefully weak points. I guess agents really does amplifies both Gell-Mann Amnesia and Dunning-Kruger in others.

[dead]

> Which is why I would never hand-write this program. Instead, I summoned it.

AI slop spam.

I don't want to use those AI sloppers. They often are not based on any intelligent design.

A good counter example is, in my opinion, htop. Many people use it, despite its ncurses-nature. It simply does what it wants to do well: give an overview over resource usage.

Yes, AI slop can spam-generate a clone, but why would I want to use that over the real thing? It makes no sense.

> I’m not packaging this application up. If you want it, just screenshot this section of the post and give it to Claude. It’ll build something useful.

I don't want this spam slop anyway, but notice that the author became super-lazy. Rather than providing source code, he tells you to copy/clone it via Claude spam. So this human is now too lazy to do anything useful. Skynet won. He has been AI slop spam absorbed, without even noticing. Just like in the movie Invasion of the body snatcher (great movie, both the original and the first remake, though I liked the remake more, because Sutherland was in his prime back then).

The author continues to show more AI slop spam created useless things. None of which is interesting. I am surprised people now blog about boring AI created software and call it engineering. So, nah, don't stop making TUIs. Instead, design them better.

Having said that, I think ncurses is the wrong tool in general. We need to be able to design both TUIs and GUIs in one go without barriers. Every time I have to use ncurses, I do indeed curse.

No.