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oblio • yesterday at 2:30 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

> 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).


Replies

miki123211 • today at 8:29 AM

As a daily screen reader user... you can't build accessibility into a TUI. You literally can't. There are no APIs for it. This is, in fact, one of my frustrations with TUIs and why I think GUIs are better in principle.

jameshart • yesterday at 2:59 PM

Many TUIs break even basic UI composability stuff like copy/paste; accessibility is even lower down the list.