Revisiting the Arcan Project
The section &quot;TUI : Text-based User Interfaces&quot; resonates with me strongly, and is somewhat relevant to the WTF thread[1] from yesterday, in particular this subthread[2] about GUI vs TUI.<p>Compare the statements:<p>&gt; terminal protocols are ghastly display server protocols in disguise<p>vs<p>&gt; &gt; At what point do we just say why not &#x27;install a modern GUI&#x27;?<p>&gt; I have yet to see a modern GUI that didn&#x27;t put pretty little animations a higher priority than being modular and configurable and having as much or as little data density as I desire<p>&gt; Command lines[3], on the other hand, do it natively if not intuitively.<p>Which brings up few interesting observations:<p>* Terminal vs graphical is almost completely orthogonal and an implementation detail. There are plenty of WIMPy style[4] TUI&#x2F;ncurses applications, and also various forms of commandlines&#x2F;repls that are natively graphical.<p>* I&#x27;d argue that there are few other categories that are less often recognized, namely &quot;keystroke-driven&quot; and &quot;web style&quot; (nomenclature is mine and not fully though out).<p>* The characteristic attributes of &quot;keystroke-driven&quot; is full interactivity (in contrast to command-line) but where typically there are no (or minimal) interactive elements on-screen. Some examples off my head would be VisiData[5], tdo[6], fman[7]. These types of applications tend to have very high data densities (what the commenter above desired)<p>* &quot;Web style&quot; applications is more ambiguous (and debatable) category, but I think there is a distinction to be made between more traditional relatively rigid widget and form based UIs and the more free-form (and usually more heavily stylized) &quot;modern&quot; UIs that have been heavily inspired by (and&#x2F;or implemented with) web design and technology.<p>* There is currently fairly big chasm between graphical applications and TUI applications, which I believe to be because there isn&#x27;t really established libraries that would be effectively &quot;graphical ncurses&quot;.  I do believe that it is a chasm that deserves to be bridged. There is no real reason why developers wanting to create small, fast, powerful tools should be constrained to archaic character cell grid by default.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17195618" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17195618</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17196031" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17196031</a>
[3] editors note: Considering the context, I suspect inetknght meant terminal applications here when they wrote &quot;Command lines&quot;
[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WIMP_(computing)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WIMP_(computing)</a>
[5] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;visidata.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;visidata.org&#x2F;</a> | Demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU</a>
[6] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mstijak.github.io&#x2F;tdo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mstijak.github.io&#x2F;tdo&#x2F;</a>
[7] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fman.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fman.io&#x2F;</a><p>in retrospect I probably should have made this a blog post instead of shoehorning it as a comment here, but oh well.