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I personally love TUI software, you don't have to worry about GUI toolkits, mouse focused interaction, you can run them remotely over SSH, they're often composable, and composability is much easier, and who doesn't like the hackerman aesthetic?

Some things I don't like about modern TUIs is developers getting away from the purpose of them, portability. Often you'll find really beautiful TUIs that require installation of custom fonts for icons and other overcomplicated stuff like that. They can be nice, but generally they sacrifice the practical benefit to a significant degree.

One I discovered yesterday, not really a TUI, more of a shell but still, extremely powerful, is kalc https://github.com/bgkillas/kalc which is a complete scientific and graphing calculator in the terminal. It depends on gnuplot for graphing, which is unfortunate since it is a GUI program, but there we go with composability again! It's fine and works and does what it needs to, so not really a big deal I guess.

I also use Helix editor and sc-im daily.

To find more:

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

https://github.com/toolleeo/cli-apps




What do you mean when you say that gnuplot is a GUI program?


It's a graphical interface as opposed to running inside a terminal.


There are GUIs available for gnuplot, but it’s primarily a terminal program, and has a REPL.




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