Lanterna VS intellij-community

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.

Also, no BuSL stupidity, they're all Apache 2 AFAIK: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23...

And the "all you can eat" toolbox license is just a staggeringly good deal, IMHO, which also comes with a "you can keep your license forever, just no updates" which is way different from setting subscription-based licensing money on fire when your license expires. Whoever came up with that should be applauded because it really drives down my "what about" anxiety of paying subscription money for IDEs

I readily admit I am not familiar enough with fossil to know about the impedance mismatch, but I'll point out that https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/tree/idea/241.... https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/idea/24... https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/idea/24... https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/idea/24... may a long way toward finding how they think about those operations

There is quite a bit going on in our view’s class, so we'll take it slow and go through its functions one by one, according to their importance. The first thing we need to do is to create the structure our items will fit into. com.intellij.ui.treeStructure.Tree seems to best match our needs, and that’s what we’ll use. In order to prepare it for what is coming, we need to configure it.

I think it's time to wrap it up. We've made a pull request to the IDEA developers, and I've accomplished the tasks I set out to do. I'm really happy to help the developers of my favorite IDE.

I offer, again, my JetBrains GrammarKit counterpoint from the last time that assertion came up <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38192427>

>>>

I consider the JetBrains parsing system to be world class and they seem to hand-write very few (instead building on this system: https://github.com/JetBrains/Grammar-Kit#readme )

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23... (the parser I'll concede, as they do seem to be hand-rolling that part)

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23... (same for its parser)

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23... and https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23...

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/blob/idea/233.... and https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/blob/idea/233....

I had the same experience with OmniGraffle, https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle

It just worked. There was support. I wouldn't dig a hole in the ground with my bare hands, why wouldn't I use good tools. Of course I would like to use F/OSS for various reasons.

The model I absolutely love is Jetbrains, their core product is OSS, Apache licensed. The whole thing, totally usable. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

The money I send their way does both, it pays for developers and it puts an amazing artifact in the world that others can use and learn from. If they weren't open source, I wouldnt pay for it. I don't know how many others are the same as me, but Jetbrains really deserves credit here.

# https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/233.9802.14/json/src/jsonSchema/schema.json#L52

and also FOSS (Apache 2): https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community (as well as PyCharm found in the "python" subdirectory)