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It appears that, by default, the textual-web command makes a WebSocket connection to textualize-dev.io and hosts through that. Unlike regular HTTP which (usually) requires a server, WebSocket is a session-based network protocol that allows for long connections with bidirectional traffic.
Take a look at the repo, because the implementation’s fairly small and the README has more info: https://github.com/Textualize/textual-web
> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.
That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)
In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.
Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.
> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.
That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)
In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.
Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.
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.
100% one of the best things about building a TUI is not having the pain of modern web development. I do think there is a way to have a CLI & TUI come from the same code, so you can get the best of both, or pick the best for the task at hand.
experiments in progress here: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_dev/lib/tui
Check this out - https://github.com/ggerganov/imtui - it's imgui for tui, and I guess one can compile it as wasm and run there!
Re telnet;
You might enjoy various https://charm.sh/ apps, especially https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish. They seem to prefer SSH to telnet though.