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0 pointsfrumplestlatz5mo ago0 comments

The idea that you need or want HTML or CSS to write a TUI is missing the entire point of what made TUIs great in the first place. They were great precisely because they were clean, fast, simple, focused -- and didn’t require an entire web stack to draw colored boxes.

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hiAndrewQuinn5mo ago

I'm not so sure about that. I've written some nontrivial TUIs in my time, the largest one being [1], and as the project got more complicated I did find myself often thinking "It sure would be nice if I could somehow just write this stuff with CSS instead of tiny state machines and control codes for coloration". There's no reason these languages couldn't compile down to a TUI as lean as hand-coloring everything yourself.

[1]: https://taskusanakirja.com/

frumplestlatzOP5mo ago

I'm certainly not advocating for a return to C + ncurses, but there's a wide ocean of options between that and HTML+CSS+JS in the terminal.

dboon5mo ago

Yes, for simple projects, absolutely. But when you're shipping something as widely adopted as CC, I disagree. At the end of the day, you're making a UI. It happens to be rendered via the terminal. You still need accessibility, consistent layouts, easy integration with your backend services, inputs, forms, and so on. If you don't need that stuff, there are lots of other, simpler options. But if you do, your other options begin to resemble a half baked, bug filled reimplementation of the web. So just use the web.

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