too many trends, thoughts about TUIs
The other day on ycombinator I found out that TUIs, Text User Interfaces, are back in style. I am greatly surprised by that to be honest. But apparently that is a thing. The article in question I read was this.
I actually read another blog article before that made me actually more thinking, I have myself written some TUIs, some even public and I actually haven't thought much about the accessibility of those, I am assume its rather bad the way that framework has implemented it, but I actually don't know, I ever cared about accessibility in HTML things and that only because my job mandated it, its something I find good in principle and I really like the spirit of it, but my daily live is just to stressful to really do anything in practical terms..which is probably how many people think.
I like TUIs, purely for the hacker aesthetic, the program i wrote episode names is just simple toolbox, something that helps me to copy paste strings of texts, I could have build it in QT, even used PySide6 to have it done in Python and it wouldn't be worse. Maybe a little bit. But I really really like the way I can change colour schemes in the console, how it renders with different fonts (my current favourite is Departure Mono). And also because it isn't mainstream, yes, that is a very hipster reason but I don't care, its something that feels hand-wrought, down to earth, honest and good. And with the advent of AI coding assistants that suck the joy out of creation for me, or rather the joy of appreciating the works of others a Text UI feels like something that tech bros don't do. Because its not flashy enough.
Apparently I was wrong.
The commentary tree of the above article made me painfully aware that my small toiling with Textual was basically just a small island in the big ocean of TUI frameworks. I was aware that the Rust crowd likes them, there are also some others like Musikcube that I personally used for a short while because I just like having things in the terminal. I want aware that newer terminal emulators have extended capabilities, or rather, I wasn't aware that that is a new thing. I thought clicking into the console with the mouse is something they invented in the late nineties or something and that full colour terminals were first seen some when around the early 2000s (I remember installing some flavor of Linux in the early 2000 and being amazed how colourful the install/startup console was when loading everything.)
And this is something I have encountered a bit more often now, life is distracting and something of what I thought is constant is suddenly changed. This is more me being distracted by everything but its also sign of rapidly changing times, and I don't like it. I don't like stagnation but still, it feels like way to many people are doing way to many things in different directions and everything is full. Its an emotion. Another domain for that is games, my eternal pile of shame doesn't grow anymore, mostly because I stopped buying games on discount even if I so plan to play them at some point because that might be ten years in the future, and in that distant future, the games are cheaper. That doesn't work with everything, the first magical months of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 online gaming are just gone, or Team Fortress 2s days before everything became hats. The game is still there, but the culture is gone. But it can be more trivial, the other day a game study called "Spider" went bankrupt, that was only slightly interesting for me, but they made a game called GreedFall and I wanted to know how the story continues. Turns out Greedfall 2 released a few weeks ago, I just didn't noticed among the constant apocalyptic news everywhere else. The game is bad and will never be good by the way.
Single point events like a game release are actually not that hard to see, I still missed it but I digress. But apparently the shift of a whole, ephemeral subcultur of UI design just went by. I knew TUIs existed, upon occasion I actually search for Textual based projects to steal/mine/get inspiration code but I totally missed that there is a big movement for software that has a console front end. Its astonishing. I blame that there really isn't any port of call in the internet anymore. Reddit is an LLM invested cesspool of propaganda in any direction sprinkled with low effort ads, lemmy just isn't there, Hackernews is in the end also a very small community and everything smaller is just not on my radar. I find that depressing, there might a whole world out there and I don't even realise it exists because there are oceans of bad content, and it grows every day.
For some reasons every blog post here ends with me resenting LLMs a bit more and for different reasons.