No, the people making TUIs in Rust are making TUIs because they love TUIs, and because Ratatui is pretty delightful. The state of GUI frameworks in Rust is irrelevant for this purpose, because even if there existed your ideal of Qt in Rust (putting aside the debatable notion that Qt is some sort of pinnacle of design), the people making TUIs wouldn't care, because that's not what they want to make.
1. Consistent font and sizing. Pick the font you find easiest to read and set it in the terminal, now all TUI apps use it at the correct size.
2. Consistent theming. TUI apps use the same color scheme as your terminal, as your vim, etc. A consistent "desktop" is less distracting. Especially when you don't have to deal with crappy Electron apps displaying animations and ads (looking at you Discord).
3. Efficient on screen real-estate. Most TUI apps don't waste a lot of space on "padding", "giving elements space to breathe" or other "correct UX patterns". They tile nicely.
4. Never and issues copy and pasting. I used a GUI chat app recently that wouldn't let me select text, seriously.
5. Did I mention they are fun to use and relatively easy to develop?
Yeah they all use the same palette, but they don't all use the palette the same way.
And copy / paste, "hm does this TUI intercept mouse clicks, ah it does, oh what was the key combo for my terminal emulator that allows to skip that? Crap I pressed ctrl-c instead of ctrl-shift-c". Or worse when you want to select text in a column-based TUI and your terminal emulator doesn't have any sort of column-selection handling.
Well-designed GUIs can be fully keyboard operated, where the mouse-driven interface only serves as a way to educate the user about which functionality is available. I'll use Tera Term (a serial terminal emulator) as an example. If you want to start a serial XMODEM transfer, you can figure out how to do it just by clicking around the user interface. You click on "File", then "Transfer", then "XMODEM", then "Send". Once you do it a few times, you remember the layout of the menus, and can start navigating solely by keyboard. Instead of "breaking your flow" by having to reach for the mouse, you just hold down Alt and type "FTXS". This is much faster, and you learned how to do it entirely from just using the program and observing which letters are underlined in the menus. There's no need to look at a manual or help page.
A well-designed TUI and GUI have great keyboard nav, discoverability, UX, and all. The question is more about what you want for the 99% of UIs that aren't well-designed nor polished, and what kind of worst-case you want to deal with.
By default, TUIs have bad discoverability unless the developer puts in the effort. But at least you have keyboard navigation and run in a terminal.
By default, GUIs have bad keybindings unless the developer puts in the effort. In the worst case they aren't even kb navigable. But at least they tend to be discoverable.
they do not, GUI is more capable of handling keyboards than TUI because terminals still have pretty dumb limitations where some modifiers aren't even visible/bindable!
This seems trivially false or disconnected from the important part of what I'm referring to here.
TUIs have to be navigable by keyboard. They could be garbage in every other way, but at least they have that.
GUIs might have keybindings as polish if the developers put in the effort. Otherwise they either don't have keybindings, or they rely on generalized keybindings that come with the OS/UI toolkit that can be bad/impossible in arbitrary ways, like if tab is swallowed by an input so you can't even tab past a component or dismiss a modal. Or the only GUI is inside a web browser.
This seems trivially false to you because you don't rise above the trivial, but also forget about similar trivial fails in TUIs.
> They could be garbage in every other way, but at least they have that
Not really, they could also not implement keyboard input for some interactions and only react to mouse. You could have a click-to-open-url in your terminal without a keyboard fallback setup. Of course, you could set it up, but that would be "polish if you put in the effort"
There is no limit to garbage.
> Also once your workflow is increasingly keyboard based (like when using a tiled window manager),
Exactly, for example, you've set your Windows key to be reponsible for all window-based movements, so you have it move/resize app windows and want to have the same key help you move/resize "inner windows/panes/columns" in a TUI app. Well, tough luck, the terminal doesn't even recognize this modifier!
Again, "as polish if you put in the effort" you can achieve anything via some external remapping to supported keys, but "otherwise" you don't have keybindings, and don't even have generalized fallback common (though not universal, again, there is no limit to garbage) to GUIs.
Or you'd be unable to bind some key combo because in a terminal that key combo is equivalent to regular typing and you need to timeout to differentiate between the two, so a permanent friction.
> tab is swallowed by an input so you can't even tab past a component
Of course you can, use your keyboard to move the mouse pointer and click outside of the input field. All pure organic keyboard-based interaction! "They could be garbage", but at lest you have that keyboard-based option (yes, only "polish/put in effort")
IMO, the value in TUIs lie in 1) Composability: we've got really good tools for manipulating terminal windows like tmux, :term in vim, etc, whereas the same can't really be said for OS-level windows and 2) As a shibboleth: They implicitly state that they're built by and for keyboard-centric technical users, and thus the wants and needs of keyboard-centric technical users are going to be the valued over the wants and needs of the lowest common denominator. 3) They look cool.
1. if you use some external window manager tool, what workflow does tmux/term provide you that OS-level windows with that tool do not?
2. specifically for "keyboard-centric tech users" that's a big fail since the terminal platform is not capable of supporting advanced keybindings presisely because all they do is "target the lowest common denominator" (as defined in 1965) of keybinding support!!!
So your cool setup from a GUI code editor is simply not transferrable.
3. this is very rare, I mean, just look at the screenshots, a lot of them couldn't even add non-gapped borders=== ---!
Every text editor and most professional apps have elaborate hotkey schemes in practice, though. It's a matter of target audience and developer intent. There's nothing special about TUIs in regards to keyboard driveability, and they're heavily limited in just about every single way I can think of. Which is the main reason most TUI apps are simple and small utilities.
Anecdotal evidence here. My use-case needs some UI, but a full blown GUI is way, way overkill.
I am building tooling around "Verifiable Credentials" (the W3C standard, OpenID standard, and all the standards around and below it).
So me and my co-workers need tools to check JWTs, resolve DIDs, generate Proof of Possession, .well-known contents and services discovery, do OpenId Connect flows, interpret "offer requests", "presentation requests", QR-codes, etc. It started as a bucket of random commandline things that random devs whipped up when needed (in typescript, python, bash, rust, some PHP), and now slowly consolidated into a consistent "toolkit".
I am currently still porting most of these tools to Rust and make their CLI interface and IO consistent.
But from there I'll be adding a TUI very quickly.
By no means meant as "end-user" software - those exist and called "wallets". But for developers and devops working in this niche. These don't need a GUI. I'd even wager these users don't want a GUI but prefer a TUI, but in any case, the TUI is just so much easier and more accessible for me as a dev that it's the choice between a TUI+CLI or no UI, just CLI.
