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cwaffles • yesterday at 9:23 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

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


Replies

oblio • yesterday at 2:30 PM

> 1. Lower resource consumption (ram, binary size)

Have you used Claude TUI? :-)

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

TUIs? Not really. TUIs aren't composable, CLIs are. Now, many TUIs also have a separate CLI mode built-in, but guess what, many good GUIs also have a built-in CLI.

TUIs are also frequently harder to automate via click-click than decent GUIs, since mature GUI toolkits tend to have built-in accessibility and I doubt anyone has ever programmed extra accesibility into any TUI in history, outside of the default keyboard access they get because they're inherently character driven (though that can take you quite far).

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