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by catern 1611 days ago
This looks cool!

But: These mostly aren't command line applications, they're mostly terminal applications. They're no more "command-line" than running "firefox" from your shell is "command-line".

There's a big difference... a terminal application takes over your terminal and doesn't have all the usual advantages of command-line applications used from the shell, like history and easy scripting.
3 comments
mellavora 1611 days ago
Ahh, after thinking about it for a moment, I see what you mean.

Yes, there is a difference. It might be better if they were called 'terminal applications', i.e. an app you run from the terminal, instead of command-line tools.

To put it another way,

sed -i -e 's/command-line/terminal-app'

:)

Regardless of name (while agreeing that names matter), they are some cool tools. I think I'm going to switch to Glow for my default markdown reader.

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hunter2_ 1611 days ago
Upon connecting to the demo, they seem to use TUI for what you're talking about and CLI for what you're not talking about.
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ayushnix 1611 days ago
> There's a big difference... a terminal application takes over your terminal

What do you mean "takes over"? You can always open another tab inside your terminal. You can use tmux to open multiple panes inside the same tab.

> and doesn't have all the usual advantages of command-line applications used from the shell, like history and easy scripting.

That may be true but at least TUI apps can be truly platform and DE independent, unlike GUI apps coming out from GTK4 where every non-trivial GTK4 app in existence is a libadwaita app. Qt apps are buggy on Wayland right now. In such a scenario, anything that runs on a terminal is a welcome addition for me. I'm done with GUI apps, except my web browser.

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tgv 1611 days ago
Your typical command line application on Unix can be piped into another one, or get its input from a file. That's not what Charm is about.
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ayushnix 1611 days ago
Sure, that's okay, it helps build TUIs rather than CLIs. I'll gladly take TUIs over their GUI counterparts in most cases except where it isn't practical such as image editing.

A good example is the lf file manager.

https://github.com/gokcehan/lf

I was using ranger before this but yeah, I have no reason to use GUI file managers anymore.

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