> Two things can be true at the same time, TUIs are superior to GUIs, and GUIs are superior to TUIs.
TUIs are GUIs - in a trench coat. A TUI program must still process input events, draw widgets, manage state & focus, etc - all the things a GUI must do. What OTOH it can't do, is even the most basic stuff, like system clipboard or displaying pictures. You have to use side channels to get that, and once you do, you throw away the TUI's one single advantage - SSH.
My terminal can display pictures and use the clipboard. Most of them can in fact. You might be limited in pictures on some but neither do we live in the 90's anymore. I routinely login to remote machines and view the pictures I have stored on them through my terminal
Yes, but the TUI application running in it can't - unless using non-portable side channels such as pbcopy or xclip. Copying text is limited to what's visible on your screen (and have fun if it's drawn inside a widget). When pasting, you're dumping the text as if it was typed in. Also, have fun with Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V.
> You might be limited in pictures [...]
That's right, sixels are indeed 1980s technology, seems like VT200 can do that.
But you know what I mean. It can't do audio, video, HDR pictures, precise mouse motion, accessibility, or even recognise shift+alt (ran out of bits in ASCII). It's a serial link, and using a side channel is just cheating.
Sure, I'm not going to use my terminal to watch HD movies in. Nor am I going to use it to browse the web. But we're being a bit obtuse here in thinking the terminal is going to do everything. There is no single tool that solves all problems. Not even the computer, as general as it is. That's okay.
Being terminally terminal doesn't mean I only use the terminal and go headless on all my machines. It is my main interface with my computers but I'm writing to you from Firefox. Nor am I going to play steam games in it. But most of the time I'm on my computer I'm not playing games or watching movies. Even with web browsing 99% of what I'm doing I don't actually need these things.
I'd love to have a web that is much more minimal. We don't need to go to walls of text like the 80's, nor even as stripped as HN (which is very lightweight), but there is a nice elegance to more minimal pages (more than just aesthetics) and the zippy experience is almost universally appreciated.
And again, a lot has changed from the 80's and no, a VT200 cannot create the images I see on my machine. I'm not looking at pixelated junk. When I'm running chafa I'm getting something quite similar to what I'm seeing if I open the picture through my file manager. I'm sure if I zoomed in I could tell the difference but that's not my usual workload.
But the original terminal was also already using a side channel. You used them to connect to a remote piece of hardware and weren’t running anything locally. In that sense ssh itself is also a side channel.
I also don’t know why you consider manipulating the system clipboard a side channel. The terminal emulator provides a way of manipulating the clipboard but that is just convenience.
Any program can access the clipboard and a TUI program can do this as well. I have a grepalike that inserts a search match into the clipboard for convience. Somewhat ironically most of the time that match gets pasted back into the terminal.
I would actually like to have a network wide clipboard system. There are solution for that but I haven’t yet found any that isn’t too unwieldy.
> But the original terminal was also already using a side channel.
What? The serial link was the only way for the terminal to talk to the Big Machine. There never was a "side channel", in fact things like control flow are mixed in-band; that's why some programs get confused about C-s and C-q.
> The terminal emulator provides a way of manipulating the clipboard but that is just convenience.
That's different from the TUI application accessing the system clipboard. You need to use pbcopy or xclip, that's non-portable, won't work over SSH, relies on those external tools being installed, etc.
> I would actually like to have a network wide clipboard system. There are solution for that but I haven’t yet found any that isn’t too unwieldy.
Try any two Apple devices signed in to the same iCloud account. It works OOB, zero setup, 100% reliable. It's called Continuity: <https://support.apple.com/en-us/108046>
Yeah, proprietary, non-portable, etc. Choose your trade-offs.
TUIs are GUIs - in a trench coat. A TUI program must still process input events, draw widgets, manage state & focus, etc - all the things a GUI must do. What OTOH it can't do, is even the most basic stuff, like system clipboard or displaying pictures. You have to use side channels to get that, and once you do, you throw away the TUI's one single advantage - SSH.