Post #2213264

“Why TUIs are back” I can’t agree that Claude Code, btop, and lazygit are proof terminal UI apps are back. Don’t assume there’s a trend because one TUI app got very popular and spawned some competitors. TUIs are inherently difficult to use because they constantly have inconsistent UX (e.g. Claude Code using the tab key to switch modes, not to move between controls), they have trouble passing non-text content around (Claude Code looks at the local clipboard for images - useless if you’re connected via SSH), they can’t consistently draw images and can’t cache them, and Unicode text rendering is ambiguous and inconsistent. When you look closer at Claude Code, it gets worse, because its React TUI library redraws large regions at a time. That’s a waste of bandwidth, when a key feature of terminals back to the 70s is that they can carefully redraw only what’s needed, and even scroll a region of text up a line rather than wiping out the screen and sending the entire text again. TUI apps (and a sad number of GUI apps) also consistently ignore that screen reader users exist, and are difficult or impossible for them to navigate. I’d say it’s even more refuted by Claude building out GUIs. There’s the web and mobile frontends now. They still suck for the same reasons. The guts of the app are still designed for the lowest common denominator, seemingly they value consistency over allowing the GUI to use its freedom to do things. There are benefits to TUIs, no question about that. Getting access to powerful tools even over SSH is very useful. But just like how there’s people who like neovim over VSCode, whether it’s “better” is subjective - it’s just what the user values most. And it’s great to have tools like btop and lazygit, but GUI equivalents also exist when you want something easier to work with. VSCode Remote is popular and really useful. There’s a reason not many Windows 1.0 and 2.0 apps were made - it didn’t do much in the way of graphics, it still feels like you’re in DOS. So you may as well just target DOS. Once Windows 3.0 brought in Macintosh-like bitmap graphics, there was a clear purpose to Windows, and the app market took off. (Yes I know there’s far more to Win1.0/2.0’s failure and Win3.0‘s success than this)