I can’t stand Gemmin-CLI. That tui gets in the way constantly
I’m mixed in jj’s tui. It’s better than no ui tho
Mostly tho I’m curious when I’d want a tui. Most of the time in a terminal I don’t want one
I want my interfacing with computers to be mouseless and TUIs offer that. I don’t think I’ve run into a GUI, no matter how many hotkeys it has and I know, where I didn’t have to reach for the mouse.
CLI only also requires remembering commands, some of which I use very infrequently, thus need to look up every time I use them.
I think TUIs hold a very nice spot between GUIs and CLI.
I use the TUI from a terminal tab in VS Code, my agent works with that and the custom extension with a webapp based interface, seamlessly and concurrently
GUIs, TUIs, and PR/kanban all make sense in different situations. We'll all use at least two of them on regular basis for coding agents.
TUIs make way less sense for your average user
I do like CLIs though, especially the ones that are properly capable of working in pipelines. Composing a pipeline of simple command-line utilities to achieve exactly what you want is very powerful.
Other CLI things benefit from this "have a minimal ui interface in the workflow for the one step where it makes sense".
1. Navigating all my chat sessions and doing admin work. It's super fast to push a single key to go in and see what it was about before deleting it.
2. Testing out features and code changes without the web UI / vs code extension complexity.
3. Places where I cannot connect VS Code. I still want to chat and see diffs, a TUI is much easier than a CLI for this.
It also has a CLI, basically three interfaces (CLI, TUI, GUI (vscode/webapp)) to the core features of my personal swiss army knife (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof)
I also find TUIs are easier to program for the same reason they’re limited. Fewer human interface aspects in play and it’s not offensive to use the same UI across OSes. (There are still under-the-hood differences across OSes, e.g. efficient file event watching.)
They have a bunch of functions that concatenate strings, which may not be very efficient compared to using string.builders, but I haven't yet had performance problems.
However I haven't had such a great experience with AI, IMO they're bad at ASCII art.
https://github.com/lrstanley/bubblezone
There are a lot of components that resemble things you find in web component libraries
https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
https://terminaltrove.com/explore/
Building for Charm, ratatui and many others is really getting much easier than before thanks to AI.
I've achieved 3 and 4 orders of magnitude CPU performance boosts and 50% RAM reductions using C in places I wouldn't normally and by selecting/designing efficient data structures. TUIs are a good example of this trend. For internal engineering, to be able to present the information we need while bypassing the millions of SLoC in the webstack is more efficient in almost every regard.
It has always been easy.
That's what happens when you vibe code your app.
No idea what this means.
emilfihlman•1h ago
I think the only reasonable option seems to be reimplementing one yourself, which is massively stupid.
NetOpWibby•1h ago
bahmboo•1h ago
verdverm•24m ago
avaer•1h ago