Post #3398034

2026-06-23 02:17 UTC

@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @synlogic4242@social.vivaldi.net Regarding modern UIs, I will say that I'm very happy that search has won over hierarchical menus in general*, particularly for launching applications. I love dmenu/rofi/wofi/fuzzel and even KRunner when I'm on my work machine. When digging through work folders that are synced with the cloud and have hundreds of thousands of files (in well-organized, but still deeply nested directories), I have my own search menu system I came up using just simple old find, grep, and zstd which is actually faster and more reliable (and much, much less resource-intensive) than the search facilities provided by Gnome or KDE and their complicated daemons and databases. * I don't mean "hamburger menus" vs. hierarchical menus, though. Those are for the birds. 😄

Replies (1)

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz 2026-06-23 02:26

@rl_dane@polymaths.social I've been doing a bit of thinking out loud (very loudly), of late, about TUIs. Half-jokingly, I have said, the modern user is so habituated to the text-based interaction with the computer, thanks to the almighty LLM, that it is high time for us oldies to sneak in the traditional TUIs into this generation of users's desktops. The non-joking half is this. Modern TUIs have got so sophisticated that they now have their own unique aesthetics. Yet, they can be programmed in the same way that were done with the 1970s and 1980s TUIs. No remote calls, no async/await, etc. Some of them even have web browser integration. Most line-of-business web apps today are used by a handful of in-house business experts only; there is absolutely no need for them to use React, Angular, and other massive web GUI frameworks. The only reason these web apps came into existence is the in-house coders wanted to get those frameworks on their resumes, so they can go work at the Big Tech. @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @synlogic4242@social.vivaldi.net

Open ##3398033