Stop Making TUIs

The CLI/TUI split in the article is right, but to me the more interesting boundary now is human-facing vs agent-facing interfaces. For most things TUIs lose on both sides.

We run an internal agentic development harness we experimentally built for working on large-ish projects. first version started as a TUI, but it quickly became unusable for the large scale projects it was meant to work on (essentially PRD to PR, with planning loops, task decomposition loops and dependency aware execution / review loops). The TUI was too state-bound for another agent to drive reliably, and too cramped for a human to review at scale. We ended up replacing the TUI with a headless cli, and every interface we've built for the harness has become either a text artifact (mostly for agents to work) or a web view (for humans to drive and review).

I find it hilarious that Claude is still a piece of shit web app. Claude can just make apps! Why not release native ones? At least the TUI is pretty good.

aerc is the best program I've ever used. tmux from anywhere. May TUIs never die.

You can't ssh into a swift app.

Or, you know what, don't listen to strangers on internet telling you what you should do. Do what you want.

So wrong.

They're fast, efficient, work across SSH, in a tmux, and survive the almost daily browser upgrades.

And they are easy to run as separate users without VNC or sandbox hell.

Like do you want to think about X/Wayland isolation, or do you just want to get shit done?

Do more TUIs.

People are unable to do good GUIs. The web shows this; completely disregarding any UI guidelines by web people established since 80s is a proof that most people have no idea how to make GUIs.

I don't know how to make a good GUI. That's why I need good templates and strong guidelines, discipline and spend long time on design. Most people don't do that.

TUI is much, much easier. It's also possible to do bad TUIs, but it's easier to do a good TUI than to do an average GUI.

What is the complaint in the article really about?

People write code using the platform X because they like it. It doesn't make sense to try to stop this

Are there not disparities between running an application in the terminal and running a native GUI? I can only speak for macOS, but my experience with bespoke native GUI applications of my own or other developers (pre-built distributions in GitHub assets) is that I must first pass through the layers of the macOS security model: doing a right-click dance to launch the application, changing permissions in security settings, etc. I assume the experience is different depending on how you set up Xcode to compile, how it's signed, etc (I have zero experience with how this works). That said, I do not recall being subjected to any of this using terminal applications.

Put differently, a GUI application seems to subject you far more to the whims of Apple or Windows than a TUI and perhaps even a different run context. Maybe the permissions fiddling for this is insignificant. Is there a clear user contract from Apple or Microsoft about this?

Naturally, this is a non-issue in Linux.

The typical TUI fan is a nerd with no clue about typography so therefore they don't notice any problem with being shown elements that have no reason to be monospaced in monospace.

i.e. ignorance is bliss in the world of typography.

I feel like this is the typical MacOS user stereotype.. Cosmetics over efficiency.

No, for the love of god never stop making TUI's.

No.

This piece is just marketing for all the authors slop coded projects

Incoherent and far too long .

Lists a bunch of things .

Fails to make any clear points .

Fails to give real reasons for the few claims it makes .

No.

I agree with the author, as long as you keep the good bits of TUIs, i.e. keyboard driven and fast. There is absolutely no reason why a GUI shouldn't be strictly better than a TUI.

I'll just copy a comment I made about this in another thread:

TUIs are just GUIs that use a grid of characters instead of pixels. They are strictly worse than true GUIs, by definition. The only thing I liked TUIs for is running over SSH, but can any of these newer ones really run over SSH with any kind of decent performance anyway?

I think people are confused and think they like TUIs because they like them being keyboard driven etc. But this could all be done with a GUI.

The other factor is probably just fashion. Similar to how some kids are now listening to music on cassette tapes, which are objectively worse than other media in almost all respects. The less cynical take is it's like vinyl: it does come with compromises but gives us back some of the things we lost over the years.

The actual interesting text-based interface is the CLI. I've seen a few examples of TUIs that really should be a CLI and would be much more useful as such.

If there's anything that's anachronistic, it's native apps.

You want it graphical: Make a webapp.

You don't: Make a TUI.

What exactly is the use case for native apps? Even lots of legacy code can build to WASM now.

(yes, I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much)

Do more TUIs. Please.

Old man yells at terminal.

Who tf cares about what the author who appears to be new to building native desktop apps (and vibe codes them) says about terminal apps?

I am not writing my code 3 times for each native platform even for agents and then dealing with signing keys just for it to break on a OS update. Terminal apps for developers survive all of this.

The entire article is just a massive rant with woefully weak points. I guess agents really does amplifies both Gell-Mann Amnesia and Dunning-Kruger in others.

[dead]

"Stop liking things I don't like!!"