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by riquito 1608 days ago
There is no doubt, is a text based interface. The common term is text user interface (TUI vs GUI), and every app rendered as characters in a shell have been always considered TUI, whether they had windows, tabs, dropdowns and whatnot
1 comments
suction 1608 days ago
OK. Then I probably should have asked whether there is anything gained by "drawing" a GUI with characters. Don't get me wrong, I spend most of my day on the command line. But I never thought "this would be so much better if it was more like windows / mac os".
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azeirah 1608 days ago
I do think so. Terminal applications tend to be really accessible.
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maccard 1608 days ago
You said accessible, so would you expect terminal applications to work with screen readers for example? What about localisation?
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azeirah 1608 days ago
I did not mean that kind of accessible. I mean easy to get, easy to install, easy to manage, easy to distribute.
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maccard 1608 days ago
apologies then! i dont understand how a tui app is necessarily get-able or installable or distributable. system package managers are more than capable of managing GUI apps, and a GUI can be distributed by uploading a zip to gh releases, just as a TUI app can be.
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krageon 1608 days ago
> would you expect terminal applications to work with screen readers for example

Can you explain to me any way in which they might not, bearing in mind they're basically text.

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riquito 1608 days ago
It's not automatic, any sufficiently complex interface will need to offer some kind of support. E.g. if your widget library offer dialogs, using e.g. ncurses, then TAB shouldn't allow you to flow out of such dialog. If you render graphic elements with special characters (dots, dashes or unusual glyphs), you would need to offer some hints to the screen reader to skip or identify differently that stuff. Just "read them out loud because is text" wouldn't work. It's been a long time since my last complex TUI so I don't know what's there today for accessibility
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maccard 1608 days ago
I did a quick Google for examples, and found this comment [0] on HN which gives some examples.

It being "basically text" doesn't matter; a pdf can be mostly just text but that doesn't mean in any shape or form that it's searchable.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683719

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