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by kataklasm 1190 days ago
At least for me, apart from all the other obvious reasons to use a TUI, a big part of it is the fact that it's so much easier to get a coherent and consistent user interface with TUIs compared to GUIs. Every GUI uses a different UI system and as such will look incoherent with other apps. Just take GTK vs Qt.The UI of my daily machine looks extremely coherent and most of that is contributed to most of my programs being CLI or TUI.
2 comments

> consistent user interface with TUIs

How? Every single TUI app i have on my system has its own look and feel, down to even using different keys for the same or similar tasks. At best a few have vi-like hjkl keys for movement (but no number prefix) and some might use ? for showing the available keys or some sort of help, but there is pretty much zero consistency beyond that.

At least in comparison the overwhelming majority of GUI applications agree on things like what Ctrl+C/X/V, Backspace, Del, Arrow, etc will do and they tend to react the same when you press the left mouse button on something that vaguely resembles a push button or a check box (most also agree how scrollbars work, though not all of them).

> Just take GTK vs Qt.

You could, but it's not exactly a great comparison. Contrast with Apple's history of HIGs and similar for a company that puts effort into consistency. Where's the equivalent in the TUI?