[cfiggers]

> If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind

This is a confusing concession. Of course we love TUIs because of the UX, what other reason is there?

Constraint breeds consistency and consistency breeds coherence.

Take 1,000 random TUI designers and 1,000 random GUI designers and plot the variations between them (use any method you like)—the TUI designers will be more tightly clustered together because the TUI interface constrains what's reasonable.

Yes of course you CAN recreate TUI-like UX in a GUI, that's not the issue. People don't. In a TUI they must. I like that UX and like that if I seek out a TUI for whatever thing I want to do, I'm highly likely to find a UX that I enjoy. Whereas with GUIs it's a crapshoot. That's it.

[Someone]

> the TUI designers will be more tightly clustered together because the TUI interface constrains what's reasonable.

It constrains what’s possible, not what’s reasonable. For example, one could typically fit more text on a screen by compressing it, but most of the time, that’s not the reasonable thing to do.

I’m saying most of the time because of the existence of English Braille (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Braille#System) which uses a compression scheme to compress frequently used words and character sequences such as ‘and’ and ‘ing’ shows that, if there is enough pressure to keep texts short, humans are willing to learn fairly idiosyncratic text compression schemes.

colorforth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth) is another, way less popular example. It uses color to shorten program source code.

One could also argue Unix, which uses a widely inconsistent ad-hoc compression scheme, writing “move” as “mv”, “copy” as “cp” or “cpy” (as in “strcpy”), etc. also shows that, but I think that would be a weaker argument.

[tolciho]

Try a 300 baud modem for a few months and good money says something terribly modern like Get-MrParameterCount would get compressed, a lot. Here's Bill Joy on the topic:

> No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow. — "Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor". The Register. 2003.

[gf000]

Come on, my previous phone had more bandwidth via a goddamn satellite, sending emergency infos.

[cfiggers]

> It constrains what’s possible, not what’s reasonable.

Why do you say "constrains what’s possible, not what’s reasonable", as though it's one and not the other? Does possibility conflict with reasonability? I would think it's not an either/or, it's a both/and.

The set of reasonable things is bounded by the set of possible things. So if the constraints of TUI design make certain things impossible, surely they make those same things unreasonable at the same time.

[gf000]

> Constraint breeds consistency and consistency breeds coherence.

In principle I would agree, but there are plenty of bad citizens among TUIs, it's absolutely not true that you can just start using one.

The same way there are excellent GUI applications like blender or intellij.

[Tanoc]

I'm sorry, excellent GUI with Blender? With the 2.5 interface things were ass backwards but you had a bunch of stuff you could do with only the mouse. With the 2.8 interface suddenly a bunch of stuff was hidden behind arcane key combinations, options disabled by default, and the loss of important visual data like the bounding box view and having both the UV and cursor coordinates in the same tab in the UV/image editor. No matter what the controls are different with every sub-window type, and interface panels flip from top to bottom and left to right for best readability without thought spared for consistency. There's a reason why someone can learn FL Studio in a few weeks, but take months or even over a year to become competent in Blender. I love it's jank and have been using it for eleven years, but I would never call the UI more than serviceable.

[majormajor]

The gap between vi and emacs is larger than that of any GUI program I use as regularly as I use either of those.