@notplants I remember having a lot of technical issues with TUI's like 10 to 15 years ago. They would never work correctly on the shell that I had access to. For example, a some sort of weird Unix shell for windows that I may have been using at the time. Or maybe the TUI was part of a installer for Linux that I had to click through, but it wasn't working w/ the virtualbox display or something. Or maybe I'm trying to set up a automated build of a piece of software. And I have to somehow configure my automation to click through the TUI, but it's really brittle and hard to manage.

These days I feel like TUIs have less technical issues where it's completely broken... The standards for terminal emulators have increased. But they still have all the same usability issues typically. They seem to thrive on hidden modes and missing affordances. Even just basic foundational things, like pagers being inserted by default on certain Linux commands, I find it to be very detrimental and tech-elitist.

The first time a user gets put into a pager, that will end their shell session completely because they will not know how to get out of it.

So every single cheat sheet for basic things like looking at journald logs, listing git commits, docker build etc etc also has to add in special syntax to prevent the pager from coming up or it has to explain what the fuck the pager is and how to get rid of it. Except none of them actually do that.

So, I think if we want TUIs to be a thing, we should probably figure out how to give them affordances and have certain standards they must meet (no hidden modes, must contain instructions showing how to exit and how to enter help if there's more than like 3-5 commands) for their inclusion into package repositories.