HACKER Q&A
📣 roundabout-host

Why are TUIs in trend?


To me, they seem to have limited graphics like CLIs but lose the composability and automation.


  👤 BeetleB Accepted Answer ✓
> To me, they seem to have limited graphics like CLIs but lose the composability and automation.

It would help the discussion if you gave examples.

TUIs have always existed, and most always had these problems. Is there any particular TUI that exists which doesn't allow for automation/composability and for which there are no good CLI alternatives?


👤 codemax98
AI coding agents made the terminal the primary surface again, and the tooling to build good TUIs finally got good at the same time

👤 ChrisArchitect
Related from a few months ago:

Why TUIs are back

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48000028


👤 kooi
Because of the increased supply of managing remote devices.

The tradeoff with limited graphics is more expansive platform support.

For example, we're doing some Layer 2/Layer 1 networking processing on an embedded linux environment. We can have a nice TUI displaying average SNR, various waveforms, connection status. It's great.

Also, when you do lots of work with remote devices, having something like termscp is wonderful for file transfer.