TUI > GUI

Recently, I've been a bit obsessed with ricing my kde/plasma setup, and no matter what I did, in the end, there were always very serious struggles and limitations, mostly regarding overall consistency. For example, if I choose fancy gradients for my panels, it will lead to inconsistencies with applications and browser, because app/website themes mostly specialized to basic dark/light themes at best and aren't going to be easily automagically adaptable to arbitrary color schemes and especially gradients. And today, when scrolling reddit I looked at yet another hyprland rice and had an absolute eureka moment: holy miku, this is why they are using TUIs for everything! TUI apps are all just a terminal! And terminal is one thing that always easy to adjust to look great and consistent in all those tiling manager rices! Torrents, music players, messangers, game launchers, file managers, it's all very well covered by TUIs. I've been so blind! Only browser is going to break looks, and I don't know solution to that ones, because sites are going to be arbitrary and there's nothing we can do about it, other than making browser fullscreen (hide panels) or customizing every single website with custom css which is unsustainable.

>which is unsustainable IDK this might be feasible with a moderate helping of AI

Why care about the aesthetics of your computer this much?

>>93071 True, but the main problem isn't even the amount of work, it's more the unbounded nature of the problem: if you follow the links from link aggregators like reddit, you may end in practically infinite amount of different sites, most of which you only visit once to read some article and then never visit it again. >>93072 No good reason. Mostly procrastinating / being scared / or just too depressed to do anything more meaningful.

>>93073 >unbounded, infinite numbers of sites, many visited only once yeah so you just throw the website at the AI and tell it to redo the CSS to fit your theme for each site. Maybe save the ones you go back to all the time.

>>93072 My computer is a digital bonsai, and I shall treat it with the respect it deserves.

Have you seen workflows that involve using a separate terminal tile in a tiling wm that acts as a project browser and in some way synced with editor in another terminal tile? For example, on this screenshot it's all built-in Konsole tiles, but in hypothetical tiling wm setup, imagine that the leftmost tile is a project browser and central tile is editor, and they are independent tiles from DE/WM POW, but started in a way that they somehow communicate and work together so that I can change which file is open in central editor tile by doing commands and navigation in left tile. Drop some names please if you know technology like this.

Oh miku, this editor is love at first sight: https://helix-editor.com/ One of the big reasons I mostly prefer VS Code to classics like vim/emacs is how good it natively supports multicursors, occurence navigation and project wide fuzzy search. This has all the same things natively, without countless plugins. I only need to figure project navigation now, because I still want to see project tree on the side, maybe not even use it for actual navigation, maybe I just need it to see context, directory structure and as a bonus, to pad code closer to the center of the screen.

>>93085 Idk how the technic is called, but it is possible under X. Gimp used to work like this by default until 3.0 iirc.

>>93088 Ah, what you're showing is a more complex technique of apps communicating through X server. I believe for those usecases I'm talking about it usually can be done by much more simple and primitive means, through files or pipes for example. It's just a matter of someone choosing to actually add built-in support for this workflow, technically there is no issue at all. A simple abstract example how it could work: in left terminal vi-navigator >> ~/.vim-project-context in center terminal: vi --project-context ~/.vim-project-context first terminal launches tui and continuously writes currently open folder/file into file second terminal launcher vi and watches for updates in context file and navigates through files accordingly

>>93085 You are describing many setups of vim/neovim. Lazyvim is a commonly touted "default setup". Personally, I am picking and choosing, using AI to do most of the annoying wiring that otherwise wastes time. I have a pretty sweet setup with a custom powerline, custom behaviors, grepping my projects in particular ways with particular keybinds... There really isn't a limit to it. It does demand a good terminal emulator, though, and there are definitely cases where a tiling WM makes more sense. And vim has a learning curve, though I feel like I've flattened it using AI and "ricing" everything to my preference.

the mouse is a useful peripheral and i don't see why lunix nerds want to try to uninvent it so badly. i suspect it's largely a form of cope due to the fact that the gui aspect of the lunix world is such a fuarrrking disaster now, people are just giving up on the entire paradigm, that and the fact that lunix is largely useless for everything but coding and coding doesn't require a gui app, only a text editor. but even then a mouse and gui editor is a lot nicer to use imo, not having to have your hands on the keyboard all the time and being able to casually scroll through code and switch to different files and put the cursor exactly where you want it with one hand on the mouse. i suspect another reason is, a lot of young gamer dorks never actually learned how to use a mouse properly, they buy a big dumb oversized gamer mouse and do the dumb fps gamer grip with their whole hand resting heavily on the mouse and moving their entire wrist to push it around instead of buying a small mouse and lightly holding it with their fingertips and moving the mouse with just their fingers with their palm and wrist resting relaxed on the table. their muscle memory is based on swinging the camera and crosshairs around in 3d fps games rather than quickly and accurately moving a cursor around on a 2d screen so they find using a mouse to be more cumbersome than using a keyboard.

>>93124 This is not about mouse actually, most TUIs support mouse. It's about unexpected splitting of apps, such as making file tree a separate app that is used both in VS-Code-like coding scenario and Dolphin-like file browsing scenario. Without tile managers this wouldn't make sense, because having to manage those separate windows of separate apps with regular window manager would be hell, it's only manageable in context of advanced tiling wms that allow to configure rules to open and wire all those separate apps together and arrange them properly on the screen.

>>93125 >because having to manage those separate windows of separate apps with regular window manager would be hell not really, you just drag and resize them on the screen to where you want them to be and then alt-tab or mouse between them, simple. modern desktop environments even have an auto-tiling feature that do the tiling for you when you drag windows to the screen edges. a tiling window manager is just a crippled stacking window manager that doesnt allow overlapping windows.

>>93128 That's already way too much work even for 2 windows, and that has to be done often. But for 4 that would be utter hell. > a tiling window manager is just a crippled stacking window manager that doesnt allow overlapping windows. Modern ones allow overlapping windows. Good thing about them is they very techy, they done by people who are doing a lot of programming and a lot of linux systems stuff, so they are all config driven, highly programmable/customizable, etc. Older WMs like KDE, Gnome, they're not designed or implemented in this sharp minimal config-driven style, they're all over the place, have ugly bloated customization systems like KWin Rules, etc.

I completely agree with you OP. The only way to get a good consistent look across 90% of programs used is to use them all as TUI's. A Terminal theme is static only updates the information. And another handy thing is a say a fair few things that run in a terminal are able to communicate with each other easier. >>93124 People like this don't understand that using a keyboard is more efficient if it set up in a way that fits you, having to aim around with a mouse and click takes longer and the GUI's are mismatched and ugly. If you're on a computer everyday the best idea is to not waste time with things that are going to take longer over the years that you're using a computer , instead learn a harder more rewarding path.

>>93070 Or you can have the best of both worlds and use emacs, i.e., get the same underlying environment for all your programs while preserving all the benefits of GUI (images rendering and variable font size). TUIs are generally much easier to tinker and adjust to your liking thanks to the terminal's limitations.

I was pondering lately on tiling WMs and how realistic it would be for me to migrate to one without losing what I enjoy about KDE/Plasma, and without uninstalling it in case I'll still need it as a fallback. I tried hyprland x noctalia, but it's very annoying to make qt applications running on hyprland conform to systemwide themes - you need qt5ct/qt6ct and those are masked by plasma-meta package on my Gentoo install. So I thought: "wait, what if I can just get tiling within KDE itself?" - and as it turns out - I can: there's like 5 alternatives. I went with krohnkite - it's just a onefile kwin script - and it just works. Another surprise: noctalia works too - just add it to kde autorun and to krohnkite exclude list. Then I just add noctalia ipc calls as normal kde app/script keybinds - and it's basically complete tiling wm experience, without losing anything I enjoy and - non less importantly - everything I used to from KDE/Plasma install. Also, there's a default krohnkite keybind to make window floaty when I want an escape hatch. I'm really happy with setup, and now I can play around with TUIs without losing any of my other usual apps and workflows, and it's all decently consistent and enjoyable. Don't mind bottom screen kde panels - I didn't rework them completely and the leftmost one is fully redundant now, I'll probably put CPU/RAM there and make the right one show data on both GPUs instead of just dGPU.

>>93223 Oh, and I absolutely refuse to give up on changing wallpapers and panel colors auto-adjusting to the current image. Noctalia has built-in option to do this, and my KDE panel colorized panels do this via a script I put in cron job. It's far from perfect color consistency, but I enjoy this variety much more than the normal thing. I'll keep refining it over time, hope it gets better, but I enjoy it already.

>>93224 Next wallpaper and bottom panels fix. Alright, I'm happy with ricing for tonight.

vimium makes any properly constructed HTML document the superior way to present and interact with information technically a gui, but far more tui-like in that it, well, is vim >>93223 KDE is wonderful.

>>93225 This is really cool lainanon What are you using to make your panels look like that in the left and right corner of the screen?

>>93387 Top panels are Noctalia, everything else is KDE panels styled with Panel-Colorizer widget. Bottom corners widget is KVitals. To be clear the whole top bar is just a single Noctalia bar, but the rest of the stuff is 5 separate KDE panels. I also started digging more terminal centric workflow with krohnkite and enjoying helix now after few days of extreme confusion.

>>93392 I'll now use fully transparent KDE panels instead of gradients for a change. PS: nyaa.si getting rekt

>>93076 >My computer is a digital bonsai, and I shall treat it with the respect it deserves. I like this. Think I'll use this quote in the future. Digital bonsai. A zen garden even, perhaps. >>93124 The vermin is fine. It's just that once I learned, or made, useful keyboard shortcuts, I couldn't stop myself. I really enjoy the little micro optimizations and the shorten distance required to make certain day-to-day actions and functions. Especially with RSI creeping up to me. There is enjoyment from finding a really good mouse peripheral, using it, and feeling comfortable with it. I use a wacom tablet to draw infrequently, but if I had the space on my desk and made a macro to adjust the boundaries to shift between screens, it would be my daily mouse driver. >>93393 your setup is really pretty!

>>93394 > useful keyboard shortcuts, I couldn't stop myself. I really enjoy the little micro optimizations and the shorten distance required to make certain day-to-day actions and functions I think there are other less obvious benefits to vimfuckery. It comes with hidden small puzzles that are constantly going on in your mind in the background. Fitness for the mind. You compose those few dozens actions into never-ending variety of emergent behaviors. It could even help to delay the onset of AI-induced dementia. I mean stuff like this, there are countless opportunities for such trickery in everyday code editing: https://nik-rev.github.io/helix-golf/invert_dictionary.html

KDE plasma user discovers terminals, lmfao. surely some other graphical neo users will stumble across this thread and try it, so instead of just insulting and moving on, I'll share what I do (what I actually do, not like those morally superior glitterboys who tell you to run an OpenBSD I2P router instead of using tor while they're using an open proxy) Terminal: st/xterm st is my primary, I've moved away from xterm because the configuration is a huge clusterfuck compared to pretty much every other terminal emulator. If you want to use some soykaf like alacritty or kitty or foot or whatever you guys are using these days that's fine. whatever works for you I guess. programs: irssi/weechat (IRC), profanity (XMPP), lynx (Web), Bombadillo (Non-Web), mpv (media player), tmux (multiplexer, I only use this when I'm hanging out in the system console) WMs/DEs: dwm/i3 (I use dwm now but I used i3 for a while and I like both of them) Hikari (yes, it's unmaintained. get over it bro.) cwm. You will want a graphical web browser unfortunately, librewolf or suckless' surf are both reasonable options. SXHKD is good if you are switching between wms all the time, since every wm has a different configuration system and it can be a pain to make all your hotkeys work just how you want.

>>93440 Pretty much the list of first things that come in search to "what is a terminal alternative to programname". Only the SXHKD is interesting, this is the first time I hear about it. I personally don't try to beardneck for the sake of beardnecking, I want stuff that has more features and better controls than usual GUI solutions not "less but it's cool because you look like le haxxor because it's in terminal". This is why I'm not interested in stuff like lynx or mpv, etc.

>>93441 Telling people what you actually use is always more valuable than moralfagging about what's "aaaahckshually interdasting" mpv is valuable for the simple fact that a fuarrrking music player shouldn't take up so much real estate on the screen like a graphical or ncurses one necessarily does. MOC is also good but mpv and moc are for two different kinds of people. I'd love to hear what meets your standards. I am always looking for good tui software. My suspicion, however, is that you don't actually use any and you're just moralfagging about it.

>>93442 > Telling people what you actually use is always more valuable than moralfagging about what's "aaaahckshually interdasting" Why do you think so? I would agree if we were on a date and the whole point was to know each other better. But on anonymous turboautism forum, what is objectively superior is more interesting than "boring but honest answer". > mpv is valuable for the simple fact that a fuarrrking music player shouldn't take up so much real estate on the screen That's a valid point for someone who wants to leave it on screen together with other stuff. I didn't think about it, because I want to keep it in separate workspace. Current track title in panel and keyboard controls is enough for me when it's set up and playing. But for browsing music, for figuring out tracks I want to schedule, I'm willing to switch to separate workspace and give it as much space as needed. > I'd love to hear what meets your standards. I am always looking for good tui software. > My suspicion, however, is that you don't actually use any and you're just moralfagging about it. The word is "larping". And that would be fair to some extent, since I'm still looking for one and using Quod Libeth in the meanwhile. My favorite candidate currently is rmpc, but I didn't actually switch to it yet, because I'm the process of figuring out other things - in particular, how realistic it would be for me to switch to modal workflows everywhere: in editor, browser (tridactyl), terminal, note taking, etc. Regarding rmpc, I don't really know how much of Quod Libeth stuff it supports. It doesn't look like it has dedicated internet radio view for example.

>>93443 Telling people what you actually use instead of recommending them the parroted "leet thing" is more valuable because you actually know what you're talking about. soykafting up a tech forum with "IF YOU DON'T USE A CUSTOM-WRITTEN OPENBSD I2P ROUTER YOU'RE A NEGROID" is completely useless. I agree that telling people about an objectively superior option is a good thing, but people are so rarely good at judging what is "objectively superior" that telling people what you actually are willing to fuarrrking USE is almost always more valuable. especially on forums like this where many of the users are new to tech, it's full of people jerking off telling each other about the obscure plan9 utilities they should be using while they view the forum from Microsoft Edge.

>>93124 >the mouse is a useful peripheral and i don't see why lunix nerds want to try to uninvent it so badly don't like moving my hands since i've started using linux (and especially since vim) i realised that i can control the computer almost entirely without moving my hands from the home row. for 95%+ of scenarios it's just as fast as using a mouse, and most of the situations which require using a mouse are due to design choices rather than necessity (obviously some exceptions like vidya) since realising this it's become extremely annoying whenever i need to move my hands to the mouse or the arrow keys, like i'm being inconvenienced

>>93463 I'm currently trying to get into touch typing and it's not easy if you've been typing wrong your entire life. My motivation though is to align with modal editing keybinds. They would often be clunky without intended hand positioning. I got keyd for capslock nav mode and tridactyl for firefox, those are great. Especially the hint mode in tridactyl. With hint mode I can navigate forms etc with using those 2 letter combos. And overall tridactyl does a lot of things I've been concerned about for a long time way before I even got interested in modal editing.

>>93466 I need to add that I wouldn't buy "almost as good as mouse" argument, I'm interested strictly in "much better than mouse driven workflows". With tridactyl I keep my hands on the home row which makes all of this very quicky accessible: > f for 2letter combo hint mode > gg for jumping to the top of page > G for jumping to the end > t to open new tab with specified query > o to open query in current tab > b to jump to one of the open tabs using query > jk to scroll page up and down > HL to go back/forward in page history stack

https://www.vimgolf.com/ ^ this is like competitive programming but for keystrokes

>>93466 yeah, i'm using VimFX which is similar to tridactyl and its awesome i learned touch typing in school (one of the only useful things i learned tbqh) so i don't know what it's like to learn it as an adult, but it only took me a week or two to get used to vim and then everything else felt wrong >>93469 scrolling by page or half-page, gg/G and placing marks are some of my favourite since they cut out the scrolling

>>93466 I got used to touch typing by typing in circumstances where I couldn't see either key letters or the screen or anything. Eventually you get used to it just grind grind grind. I have now done some non trivial computer interactions like booting, logging in, and resetting passwords or turning on or off certain daemons without the screen at all haha.

>>93466 why tridactyl instead of vimium? I don't claim that one is better than the other.

>>93498 I like shortcuts a bit more here: b instead of shift+t (one of my most used shortcuts) t instead of shift+o full featured command mode on : dedicated focus mode on ;; those last two seem to be completely absent in vimium

>>93509 mapping is present but I haven't learned about the latter two. I might take a look at that then. thank you for the useful signal, lainon.

>>93443 An update I guess. Still doing all this. Considering trying nvim, because I discovered that many of the best ideas of helix come from nvim plugins (like telescope, surround, etc), but in nvim they are more flexible, have more features, and there's a huge variety of other plugins which are not represented in helix. Also, it's a bit annoying to use software with vim mode and have kinda familiar but just slightly different keybinds, like G vs ge, etc. Worth mentioning, there's a fork of helix that supports plugins, in scheme dialect called steele, which is pretty cool, but it's at current point very far from maturity of nvim ecosystem.