Why kill it? What's wrong with CLI interfaces?

retrocryptid · on May 8, 2023

There's nothing wrong with CLIs. Emulating the idiocy of HTML in the terminal window is... suboptimal.

(n)curses isn't great, but the joy of ncurses is it's so bad you know you need to replace it (or more likely layer something on top of it.)

jitl · on May 8, 2023

This seems to be much nicer than ncurses, since it's a declarative interface rather than an imperative one. Outside of Flexbox, there's nothing HMTL-specific in the API. An XML-like syntax is used because UI on most platforms is conceived as an ordered tree structure, such as Windows (XAML), Apple (XIB), Android, and Web (HTML).

The built-in components are all conceived as TTY-native ideas, not as HTML concepts:

    <Text>
    <Box>
    <Newline>
    <Spacer>
    <Static>
    <Transform>

robertoandred · on May 8, 2023

React isn't HTML.

lwansbrough · on May 8, 2023

Holy semantics. JSX is based on XML, which HTML is also based on. I think GP just hates React and JSX, which is valid.

zokier · on May 9, 2023

Html is not really based on xml, historically its more like the other way around, xml was inspired by html(/sgml). Xhtml was distinct dead-end evolutionary branch

retrocryptid · on May 10, 2023

It is true I do not care for xml, html, xhtml or sgml. And the one thing that was decent about sgml, dsssl, we threw away. I do not care for the box model of HTML and would prefer for a segmented flow model so I can easily reason about pages as being... well... pages. I have no problem with declarative layout or semantic documents, but dislike frameworks that conflate the two.

But... clearly... if you like react on HTML and want to have browser-like rendering of text on your terminal than more power to you. I'll go off now and build something that demonstrates my concerns. Thx for not severely down-voting my comment before I could begin to clarify...

michaelsbradley · on May 9, 2023

Maybe give Notcurses a look: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

retrocryptid · on May 10, 2023

Thx for the reference. I hadn't seen this before.

1letterunixname · on May 9, 2023

Curses bindings in another language, say Ruby or Python, makes it a lot easier to deal with.

I wrote a disk drive monitor in Ruby in an afternoon using curses to crop the window and reduce flashing of redrawing.