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chrysopraceyesterday at 8:23 PM1 replyview on HN

GUIs are often mouse-centric, resource-hungry.

TUIs and CLIs are often keyboard centric only use as many resources as it takes to do the task, and then minimal resources to draw the text. Most CLIs also follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, so you can get an output from a CLI and then pipe it into another.

At work I literally use the same workflow at home across two different operating systems because they both share a terminal. I don't even know how to switch workspace on a Mac because I don't need to, tmux sessions fulfil the same task.


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Barrin92yesterday at 8:47 PM

>Most CLIs also follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well,

basi cli tools yes, but software like the one we're commenting on has a TUI so complex they simply emulate graphical user environments and widgets but on a text rendering stack, akin to web apps pretending to be graphical applications on top of a markup language, except they do it out of necessity because that's how the web works.

If you want to draw graphical user interfaces on an operating system just use the... actual graphics stack. There's terminal apps with widget frameworks now that painstakingly try to reproduce what every OS ships with just because it's.. cool to be a terminal hacker or something?

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