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.