The UX actually matters, and TUIs are generally built for effectiveness and power (lazygit being an excellent example). But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.
You can be effective and powerful in any kind of interface, Just like you can be ineffective and weak in any kind of interface. People like TUIs because they're cool, and work over SSH.
enter ~C -L 8080:localhost:80(Ultimately unhelpful though because I use mosh everywhere these days and that doesn't appear to have anything fancy like this.)
(I think terminal-based GUIs are neat just for fluidity of use- you can pop one open during a terminal session and close it without switching to mouse or shifting your attention away from the terminal. They can also be a nice addon to a primarily CLI utility without introducing big dependencies)
Then colour my suprise when it popped up on my screen right there. Slow as molasses but still. Wow. Magic.
It's a shame Wayland dropped this. Yes I know there's waypipe but it's not the same.
It... really isn't. Like you said, remote X was barely usable even over an entirely local network. Most applications these days are also not designed for it, using loads of bitmap graphics instead of efficient, low-level primitives. So you end up being just one tiny step away from simply streaming a video of your windows. We have better tools for doing things remotely these days, there's a reason approximately no one has used remote X after the mid-90s. It's a neat party trick, but I don't blame the Wayland authors for not wanting to support it.
> Design once, generate production-ready code for your framework of choice. Switch targets without touching your design. Alpha notice: Code export is not functional yet. We're actively working on it — check back soon.
In other words, it isn't at all usable right now. You can't produce a TUI with it, not even a limited one.
I'd much rather terminals emulator provide a webview directly, and maybe use https://webtui.ironclad.sh/ if you really want the look.
I think it makes more sense for a cli to offer a mini webserver instead.
Think `fish_config`, but opened in the terminal directly [0].
[0]: like https://iterm2.com/browser-plugin.html
This is really cool though.
It completely misses the reason people like current TUIs.
Also if TUIs are so great, why isn't this a TUI app?
also
> Gatekeeper blocks the app immediately. You'll see either "TUIStudio cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer" or "TUIStudio is damaged and can't be opened" on newer macOS after quarantine flags the binary. To get past it: right-click the .app → Open → Open anyway — or go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway".
Browsers are ubiquitous and I can just tell ai to build a web page. I can't really see a use case other than novelty.
I mean yes, code editor are great for this but a lot of the TUIs I see are so slow it begs the question why they exist to begin. CLIs are supposed to be remixable and scriptable.
I think a better architecture would be to generally keep CLIs work like CLIs and have separate processes that add terminal rendering functionalities for those that need / want it but in general it is an anti-pattern to start from this as default.
The fact that even the preview isn't a TUI is just lame. Keyboard controls are also non-functional right now.
I don't think there is utf8 characters that allow for drawing on the outside of the cell, (happy to be wrong)
┌ (U+250C), ┐ (U+2510), └ (U+2514), ┘ (U+2518) <-- these 4 draw in the middle of the cell.
｢ (U+FF62), ⌟, (U+231F), <-- these are two that cover part of the outside, but not the other corners.
｢┐└｣
Can anyone tells me how to get those 'corner of cell' characters, including uprights and horizontals ?
One of the most original ideas I have seen on HackerNews in the past few years.