hackernews-TUI VS awesome-tuis

Considering that I only access reddit either occasionally from Relay on my phone or primarily modified version of the terminal TUI tuir (They killed the API token for TUIR, but you can still use it if you setup your own API key.) which I'm using now to write this comment from, it would likely reduce my Reddit usage by >90%. I usually have tuir nested in a tmux session, which I would likely change to a hackernews reader like hackernews-TUI.

Hi everyone, this is my second "Show HN" submission posted in Hacker News. The first one was https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI. I received a lot of good feedbacks and suggestions from the community back then. For the second one, I also look forward to hearing the community's opinions.

A bit background on the project: I started `hackernews-tui` and after that `spotify-player` (both are terminal application) because I want to learn Rust and build applications with Rust which I'm able to use daily.

`spotify-player` is a terminal application that can be used as either a remote player to control another Spotify client or a local player with an integrated Spotify client. So if you already know spotify-tui[1] or ncspot[2], `spotify-player` is kinda a simplified combination of both =).

I have two demo videos for the application, one in youtube https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Jbfe9GLNWbA and the another in asciicast https://asciinema.org/a/446913.

Hope you guys give it a try. Any feedbacks are highly appreciated!

[1]: https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui

-hackernews, https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI/

> something that cuts out all layout, formatting and images and shows me the raw article text in a fixed with font.

FYI, I have implemented a reader view for `hackernews_tui v0.6.0` [0] which seems to satisfy most of the conditions above. Judging from my experience, this reader view works quite well and can cover many use cases.

[0]: https://github.com/aome510/hackernews-TUI/releases/tag/v0.6....

Here's an "awesome" TUI list I like: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

And here's a list I made myself, the ones with rainbows have TUIs or pretty colors:

> Editing multiline inputs is awful.

Outside of "line at a time" i/o (a rarely used mode where an entire line is edited locally and then sent to the host), most of what users see is as interactive is controlled by the program you are interacting with. The terminal just takes commands from the host and does what it is told. BTW, line at a time mode isn't used that much. The only thing I use that uses line at a time mode is telenet in LINEMODE.

> Navigating history is so-so

Yes, that is because the program you are likely interacting with where history is relevant implements it's own repl or command line (i.e. bash, zsh, python, etc...) and it is responsible for it's own history and may implement it completely differently than say, bash or zsh.

> Why are terminals always stuck in the 70s? Can I get a modern terminal?

We do have a modern terminal: the web browser... and it's pretty nice.

There have been a ton of tries at more modern terminals, but ultimately, they end up really being limited by the software running in the terminal session. In the 90s we had a ton of commercial terminal emulators that would allow you to create full guis, complete with dialogs and forms. In the 00's there were a few tries at terminals that would allow html output and embedding of html forms for input (can't remember the names of them). I suppose there's also the whole X11 thing... which is so good enough that it's really hard to kill.

Let's get back to character mode:

A lot of interactive terminal software is built using different libraries - so sometimes you get a terminal gui based on ncurses, terminal.gui, or something else... here's a list: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis#libraries. Most of these libraries try to use most of the features in your terminal emulator, but often, just use stuff that is in everything.

For command line programs (i.e. just type a command), a lot of the experience is dictated by the parser used by the tool and whatever the underlying operating system has for passing arguments. Some shells and terminal emulators (like iTerm2 on mac) try to smooth this out, but again, there's a lot of variety in command line parsers.

Probably the biggest modern improvement in the shell world was gettext and various command-line completion libraries which allows command parameter completion if the developer supports it or uses a parser that supports completion. But none of this is the terminal itself doing the work.

Haven't done much in grafana but probably use that to constantly output to a small display. Depending on if you want to install a display server... Seems like there are lots of options, maybe grafterm is what you're looking for: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

Check out this list of great TUI projects if you really want to see what terminal only is capable of.

This looks really cool! Would you mind PRing it to my awesome TUIs list? https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

See also: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

Here's a good list

Have a browse at the awesome-tui list and in the reddit search bar: this question is asked quite often and there are already plenty of answers :)

https://github.com/toolleeo/cli-apps and https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis? Though it doesn't mention a specific GUI apps (eg, Lynx is under either Web Browser or Web on those lists), and it's just lists, no actual comparison or review etc. I usually found AlternativeTo to be somewhat decent start to see what features and alternatives I can expect across platform.