Ask HN: Why are there not more terminal apps? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are there not more terminal apps?

6 pointslucasov9 comments

Also, why are there not more ssh apps (like terminal.shop)? Would you want to use more apps in terminal?

I think that there's just a big chasm between average GUI users and terminal avid folk. The mental user map of how to operate software differs so much between GUI/TUI. Enabling pointer integration helps close this gap, but at the same time acts against the motivation of terminal apps (namely pointer-less interaction).

Personally I really like the work and effort that flows into ratatui and it's ecosystem. I've invested a lot of my time recently in creating multiple TUIs/CLIs, if you're interested in exploring a bit:

- Jupyter notebook TUI: https://github.com/samox73/jotter

- Github/pandoc Markdown with LaTeX renderer: https://github.com/samox73/visomd

- Recolor pictures constraining to a certain color palette: https://github.com/samox73/paletteer

I think we're going to see a lot more apps in the terminals soon. The primary user of software is no longer human anyway.

Definitely a good place to build in.

That would be an interesting development, but makes sense. As humans move towards simpler GUI apps to set their AI to work, AIs start making their own terminal apps to get stuff done (because the primary writer of software is no longer human either...).

I still stick to Claude Code in terminal though, it just seems faster and smoother and I keep some more view of what is roughly going on under the hood, even if it's just a little)

I use herdr a lot

If anything, with things like libghostty, I expect more desktop apps with built in terminals. Instead of me having to go to the browser for github, jira, etc, have it all in one app along with whatever terminal tooling you're using

Or more likely, based on what the other engineers I work with are doing, we will all vibecode our own tooling that fit our individual workflow

As an older developer (50+) I tend to use terminal apps for my workflow: vim, ssh, git, scripts for building, and now Claude code. There are gui and web interfaces for all of this. The junior developers on my team are not comfortable with terminal apps. I spend my day in vim and zsh, but the world has moved on. On we go, up the ladder of abstraction.

yes but these are tools, I mean like general apps. Even Hacker News, we should make like a terminal version of it

Doing a quick search shows me many implementations of hacker news in the terminal.

I guess vibe coding has made a huge change - like a few years we didn't see any such app which was used commercially but have been changed. In future we'd see more apps - being light weight and fast makes life so much easier :-)

Uh, what are you on about? There's plenty of terminal apps. Like, literally everything that I use on a daily basis can be done from the terminal.

Which ones have you found missing or lacking?

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