If I’m in my terminal, a command line interface, doing some monitoring or just browsing around, it’s a habit, I always hit brew upgrade, to make sure my app/package that was installed through Homebrew has the latest update, and sometime, brew will gave me some list of newest package that was either newly updated or newwly submitted to Homebrew repository.
Long before, I got introduced to htop, an application to monitor and track your resource usage, like CPU, RAM and track what processes run in the background, and then, found btop and then k9s and then macmon and then…
See the commonality? yes it’s a TUI, or Terminal User Interface, or used to be called Text-based User Interface, the text-based user interface has been there for a long time, I used to code to display the interface using this method, using Turbo Pascal, building an interface to be use for the user using manually calculating the pixel of the monitor, and positioning each of coded “component” on each reserved pixel, I believe the resolution was 320x240, you need to place your weaved your interface via combining each of ASCII characters to became a table, or some borders.
Even though they are the same, TUI vs TUI, the main differences is in how it was displayed, the modern TUI, can displayed emoji, UTF characters, and also can interact with mouse.
And I am a massive fan of TUI, just like the old time, but with modern touch, sometimes it uses GPU to run, and with modern touch, it can do so much, beside above tools mentioned above, I do like to explore more, what other app was packaged using TUI, and I found that there’s image viewer using TUI, there’s even music player built for TUI, like kew or musickube or termusic, I like it.
The ecosystem to build this TUI app also growing, many people found it more and more, and many engineer build this, and then born many library to build TUI app like Bubble Tea, Ratatui or OpenTUI, and some people are very creative, like the one I just found, a TUI based email client, neo.md.
This will not fade away, there are always people who loved the simplicity of TUI, and interacting with computer without the need of a mouse.
Links:
- TUI library (Bubble Tea, Ratatui, OpenTUI)
- List of awesome TUIs app