Re: [dev] ncurses or ...

From: Charlie Kester <corky1951_AT_comcast.net>
Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2014 09:04:43 -0800

On Fri 31 Jan 2014 at 17:11:35 PST Nick wrote:
>
>Oh, and to come in on an earlier point that was made, TUI sucks, the
>only good thing about it is that TUI programs tend to have better
>keybindings and scriptability.

My two cents for this bikeshed debate:

All software sucks to some degree. The point is to find or create
software which sucks *less*.

Many (if not most) GUI programs are overburdened with graphical bells
and whistles which add nothing to the ostensible purpose. Just as
WYSIWYG editors lead to premature fiddling with fonts and other
graphical details, to the detriment of the actual content, so does a GUI
interface foster in the developer a premature obsession with
*appearances* rather than the suckless virtues of simplicity,
correctness, etc.

That said, there are many cases where even a TUI is too much. A
commandline app would do the job just as well, and often better. For
example, compare the 'sort' command to a TUI or GUI attempting the same
task.

ncurses is a sucky beast, true, but is it really worse than the
Cairo/Pango/Harfbuzz/Fontconfig/Xft/... stack employed by most GUI apps?

If the proposed library makes it easier to write suckless apps, I'm all
for it. If there's anything I can do to help make it happen, I will.
Received on Sat Feb 01 2014 - 18:04:43 CET

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