alt Hacker News> While it’s true that if you randomly pick a GUI and a TUI application, the latter is more probable to be fully keyboard-driven, this does not tip the scale in favor of developing TUIs over GUIs3. What it does is highlight the inadequacies of keyboard navigation in many GUI applications.
Something to consider is a terminal that has keyboard navigation of its own. Through a terminal shortcut, I can move the cursor at will and copy any text at all, even if it's part of the interface of a TUI. If I want to copy the filepath of the file I'm working on in vim to then use in a shell, for example, it takes like 5 keys to copy it straight off vim's statusbar. A graphical text editor can display the filepath in a tab or something, but I can't copy the text off the tab.
I don't know if I'm alone in this, but it's very frustrating to want a piece text, see it in front of you, and you can't copy it because the developer for one reason or another didn't implement copying of that text, so you have to type it out even if it's right there.
Sometimes it seems on purpose too. For example, when a game on Steam gets updated terms of use, you get presented with a window showing the terms, but you can't copy them to save them. It's like the purpose is to just accept and forget the terms. A TUI can't prevent the user from copying text by its very nature.
Any terminal can implement this kind of arbitrary-text keyboard navigation on its own and have it work for all TUIs. Were e.g. GTK to implement something like this, it would only work for GTK apps, not for all GUI apps. This is exclusive of TUIs because TUIs are text-driven while GUIs are pixel-driven.
Replies
Any text-centric action will have a great advantage when done inside a terminal. I would think the equivalent in GUIs would be first-class OCR support on the compositor level. I am not informed about any progress made in that region to be honest, so I cannot tell how close we are (or not) to this.
>A TUI can't prevent the user from copying text by its very nature.
Funny but I struggle with copying anything in most recent TUIs. Fancy padding or multiplexer borders and multiple lines of text? It breaks. Incomplete text in a spreadsheet column (tabiew) or a narrow internal window? It breaks. Ohmypi literally has a separate command to copy the prompt because of that, and another command to copy the model reply. TUI is just a poor choice here, it doesn't play well with formatted text like markdown, UI controls, long text, and so on. Terminals are good for CLI where the text is presented as lines, not TUI with spaced layout.
>Any terminal can implement this kind of arbitrary-text keyboard navigation on its own and have it work for all TUIs. Were e.g. GTK to implement something like this, it would only work for GTK apps, not for all GUI apps. This is exclusive of TUIs because TUIs are text-driven while GUIs are pixel-driven.
Terminal navigation has nothing to do with TUI navigation. Most TUI apps suffer from terrible NIH and end up with their own homegrown incompatible keyboard navigation schemas you need to learn every time. Of course absolutely nothing prevents you from writing a TUI framework with a common schema, at which point you will be at the mercy of the dev using this or that framework and schema, same as with GTK and Qt. None of this is unique to TUIs or GUIs.