Lanterna VS Ink

I wrote a TUI before for work, entirely of my own volition and for my own near-exclusive consumption (it was theoretically for anyone, but I'm the only person who would've had a reason to look at it - we were a fairly silo'd dev shop).

This is what made me pick TUI over a web UI:

* no web stack, period. no client/server. no js or html. this simplified the problem dramatically. also, no additional services to babysit.

* no browser - no certificates, security, auth, etc. It's just unix permissions and ssh.

* there's something comforting about the constraints of just ASCII/ANSI and curses. No bikeshedding over border widths or radii when it's just you picking among a few characters for the shape. just having less decisions to make speeds things up and helps you focus on what you actually want the UI to be able to do.

Obviously if your app is just calling APIs anyway, that might be negate some of these bullets about no additional services to babysit etc. In this case, it was running an internal infra app that directly connected to a pg db.

And what made me pick it over just having a CLI:

* discoverability - it was a complicated app and while it was all technically exposed via cli flags, having a GUI made it a lot easier to figure out what the right incantation is.

* richer communication medium that's back-and-forth instead of unidirectional. The TUI is able to fetch a list of e.g. valid IDs and let you pick them with a check-list, instead of you having to go query the db yourself and type them in.

I consider it one of my greatest victories that my boss was able to use the TUI to recover from an incident without needing to page me while I was on holiday, and he said he barely had to read the docs and felt confident he was getting it right the first time. "I did it while sipping my coffee."

I used https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna - would recommend. They even have a Swing-based emulation mode for easy development iteration running it from intelliJ.

This looks really cool.

In the past I used lanterna (https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna/tree/master) to develop a text UI for a critical process at the trading firm I worked at. It was essentially a process that would take updated market data and handle things that changed between the last trading session and today - like symbol renames (PCLN to BKNG), changes to market cap that make it change what "category" it fell into (they were based on market cap and volatility measures etc). Things of that nature, that the realtime system didn't handle but happened too often or were too hairy for us to just handle manually.

The system had a desktop UI component that was oriented towards use by our trading staff. We didn't really have notion of a "server UI" and the server was headless.

Nobody at our firm was a frontend developer, just backend, systems and data programmers who occasionally dabbled in frontend. So web UIs were very simplistic or highly specific to their use-case, we had no shared tooling.

In 2023 with things like create-react-app and whatever next.js does, I probably would've opted for one of those. I could've made another desktop app but I wanted to be able to easily get to this from a shitty ssh connection over tethered 4g when I was on-call. So X11 forwarding and RDP were out. So i looked around for a TUI-builder in the project's language, Java.

What i really liked about Lanterna was that it had a Swing-based implementation which meant I could easily run it from IntelliJ, and that would let me iterate rapidly, and then in production I could run it in a terminal via SSH directly on the machine the server was on (which had certain advantages).

I'll keep an eye on this to see if I can think of anything neat to build on it. I still generally don't like web apps because they feel like they take a lot of effort to get something compared to a functionally-equivalent product built in something non-browser-based like a TUI or desktop GUI.

Just to differ what others already mentioned: Lanterna. Pretty retro GUIs just for fun.

Lanterna https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna Has examples for most of the things you're looking for (see links in https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna/blob/master/docs/contents.md)

You can use a library such as https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna to do fancy console printing. You could even do full console UIs, but just printing lines and moving the cursor and so on is also possible I think.

There is lanterna for that.

You can use https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna

Is this just a personal excercise? Because https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna is pretty much what you're talking about and pretty good.

I've always wanted to build a CLI tool, and when I realized that you can build one using React with Ink, I converted my Python script into a CLI tool.

⚠️ Git for Windows Terminal is currently not supported, and the tool is limited to ink. We will look for alternatives later. Please use CMD, Vscode terminal's Git... terminal

There is a good solution for some of those cases - ink. With ink, I can implement text-based UI with knowledge of React, which is neat but there are still some caveats for my usages:

Looks cool, right? Building a similar UI in the terminal without any library would be quite hard, though, thanks to Ink it's almost as easy as building any frontend UI with React.

ink?

I'm writing a CLI with ink. Writing async code is important as to not block the rendering and respond to user input. I have a few loading animations that update every 100ms. Synchronous operations can make the animation hang for >500ms, making the animation choppy.

You get the comfort of using react components instead of fighting with HTML tables to make your emails look nice. I think it's awesome! It's analog to what ink[0] does with CLI outputs. Sure, you could write fancy CLI outputs in bash, but ink takes the pain out of it and makes it easy.

[0] https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

Due to Node's asynchronous behavior, it makes Node great for long-running processes that make a lot of HTTP requests, database calls, and other async ops, like a web server or a REST API. However, if I am making a CLI tool for pretty much personal use only, with very minimal async operations, then blocking the event loop with a synchronous function that will resolve almost immediately will make no difference perceivable to a human brain or have any speed benefits that someone can actually observe (think `fs.readFileSync` or `require('dotenv') of 10 line config file, or a quick embedded db (sqlite) query with only ~100 records. I'm wondering what the best way to implement the database part of the app synchronous. I can read/write to JSON files but it would be tricky because the data is relational, and some complex joins and other data wrangling operations are required (complex to perform in JS but are easy to implement in a SQL statement). It's not important what the operations are, that's not the point of this post. This is mostly a personal project of interest: making this CLI tool completely avoiding any async operations/using no promises. I would like to use node tho, as I said this is just out of interest and I also want to experiment with several CLI libraries such as Ink or Cliffy.