TUI Demo – Terminal Interface to Mastodon
This is certainly well done. But, I don&#x27;t get the point of complex TUIs. Granted - text consoles are useful because they allow programs to get input, output, and job control, and even text selection with very little effort. It can&#x27;t get simpler than printf() and friends.<p>With more complex TUIs these points don&#x27;t really apply. There is a lot of effort involved to get the layout right, so why not make it nice? Text selection isn&#x27;t possible with windows (I guess? Do text terminals support this stuff?).<p>Font support is awful (only 1 font size, limited font styles), text is harder to read, and so on.<p>Terminal interfaces have an ergonomic advantage over traditional GUIs in that they are not painfully context dependent: dealing with keyboard focus is annoying and slows the user down. But, it&#x27;s just a cultural thing and it&#x27;s easy to make graphical applications with a TUI-like input model.<p>The only arguments in favor of TUI that I can see is that they are really fast to load up (compared to ~1 sec that it takes to create an OpenGL window) and that you can easily use them over an SSH connection.<p>A last argument might be that many window managers suck at switching between windows. What bash or tmux do might be more ergonomic for some people.