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Comment by neverrroot | Hacker News Reader

I love TUI. Nothing beats its clean UI, focus, speed and the resulting productivity. Learn a few shortcuts and fly. We need more TUI apps.

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The worst part is there's absolutely nothing stopping anyone from making the same principles work in the browser. Zero. Nada. It's trivially proven by compiling apps to wasm and running in a terminal emulator but there's nothing stopping anyone from building react-terminal-like or whatever except that... I don't even know what since we've got https://github.com/Textualize/textual-web.

People have thrown out decades of UX research and engineering out of the window because it isn't cool anymore. Makes me sick.

> People have thrown out decades of UX research and engineering out of the window because it isn't cool anymore. Makes me sick.

Most people don’t want to browse the web with a keyboard.

Traffic to many websites primarily comes from mobile devices with touchscreens.

It has nothing to do with being “cool”. Terminal interfaces are great for those of us who spend a lot of time attached to the keyboard, but most people don’t operate like that.

It's not about the keyboard, it's about discoverability and standards. Designers think their ideas are sooo good that they warrant overthrowing previously established norms of computer interaction. You now need to re-learn where things are for every new "application".

> Most people don’t want to browse the web with a keyboard.

You can easily add mouse support for the equivalent of a TUI.

Unlike CLIs (and shells) which requires learning a language and memorizing, TUIs give you relevant options.

> most people don’t operate like that

I'm convinced that if more UIs were simpler state machines, computers would be easier to use for non-programmers.

> Most people don't want to browse the web with a keyboard.

Site-specific keyboard shortcuts are a thing, they're important for accessibility. Unfortunately most sites either don't support them or do a poor job of documenting that support in a way that can be surfaced by users.

I also love TUI, and ratatui in particular, but ... are there any TUI frameworks with accessibility features? Is that even possible?

I worry that we've taken the TTY, a foundational accessibility device, and found a way to slap an inaccessible technology layer on top of it.

It's something I've thought about a little, but I haven't seen anything that does it. There's some pretty large blockers though. TUIs get by on effectively rendering text all over the screen, potentially out of order, and potentially without respect to whether that text makes any logical sense. AFAIK, There's no way to attach metadata to screen characters or regions that would mark up things as buttons / inputs / outputs / etc.

That said, I suspect that the right modality for accessibile command line apps is repls / cli apps rather than TUI apps.

In particular, curses(3) was the "virtual DOM" of its day, so its output can be arbitrary pieces of TUI elements, and it may and will re-render an element with different terminal control strings if it can save bytes on the wire (recall: this was at ~300 baud) by grouping neighbouring updates.

We're working on a new TUI for managing local and remote executions of optimization solvers like CBC, HiGHS, and our own hardware-accelerated solvers [2].

Ratatui is a delight to work with. It uses immediate mode rendering [3] which feels very intuitive compared to other TUI frameworks.

[1] https://github.com/integrated-reasoning/napali [2] https://reason.ing [3] https://ratatui.rs/concepts/rendering/

I built https://prose.sh off of Charm and while it was a lot of fun, nothing beats what you can build in the browser.

Having said that, SSH apps are very ergonomic for the demo on this site. We have been able to build a lot of cool features on top of SSH and Charm.

We are working on a static hosting site that provides a zero install CLI. It’s sick and everyone is going to want to use it. https://pgs.sh

What beats that is a good GUI with all those features but without being limited by the clunky terminal host, which, for example, doesn't support all the power of the keyboard shortcuts

Is that a serious limitation, though? Sure, the terminal cannot support all the keyboard interactions that an old-style DOS TUI could use, but it can get pretty close for most purposes.

If you want to fly with a few shortcuts it is, otherwise no: most of the apps illustrate that "most purposes" can be served with pretty bad keybinding support

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