[MisterTea]

> What originally got me excited to build TUIs was the concept of delivering apps over the wire via SSH. SSH apps resemble a browser in that way: no local installs required.

It's a shame that a serial port typewriter emulator has somehow managed to stay alive. Instead of building new and exciting system based on new and exciting technology we get GPU accelerated typewriter emulators. It's a weird form of tech blindness mixed with nostalgia. Why arent we moving on? ssh? You can pipe whatever protocol over ssh.

I would really prefer if we moved on and worked on drawing to remote bit mapped displays. We have examples to learn from: X windows was network transparent though not a well thought out design (see audio.) Plan 9 has devdraw, an rpc based rendering engine that you load assets into then issue draw commands over the wire from a remote graphics program.

[horsawlarway]

This has surprisingly few valid use-cases.

We see this today - there are plenty of protocols to support rendering applications over the wire (vnc, rdp, x-forwarding, waypipe, broadway, etc...)

They get very, very little usage outside of highly technical spaces. The demand just isn't there.

What did get there was the browser - which solved this problem quite nicely for basically every desired use-case, and has the benefit of offloading most of the computation to the remote device.

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And as an aside - text remains a wonderful medium, with an incredible amount of composition and flexibility. The issue with GUI systems is that output != input. And it turns out that matters quite a bit, and is unavoidably limiting.

[MisterTea]

The web is way too heavy for simple applications. On Plan 9 devdraw text is a first class primitive - its a GUI built around displaying text.

And who said text isn't a useful medium? We are discussing how it is displayed which today is on bitmapped displays.

> The issue with GUI systems is that output != input.

Can you elaborate?

[tracker1]

I'm pretty sure you could create an HTML based calculator app pretty easily with minimal overhead. Hell monaco (editor in VS Code) is massive by comparison to most apps... there's very little reason most line of business needs and simple apps can't or shouldn't be done in browser.

You get composition, scaling, accessibility features and a host of other benefits in the box that any other toolkit for GUI adds a lot of developer overhead.

[TremendousJudge]

Recently, I have used both Zed[0] and VSCode[1] remotely via SSH. It works just fine, and it was painless to set up. I remember years ago last time I tried, it was a much harder process.

[0] https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

[antiframe]

In Emacs it's been easy for a long time. Just use /ssh:user@host:path/to/file and it appears local. The added advantage, which I am not sure is supported by most editors is that if you want you can use the remote environment for builds, tests, etc. Like if I C-c C-c a defun it gets compiled and updated in the remote running image.