Aye, that’ll be it then. The docs went live towards the end of October, with the release of 0.2.0 (which was a huge change over 0.1, adding the whole CSS approach). If you do decide to dip back by for a look you should hopefully find the documentation covers a lot now, with a really rich tutorial. Still plenty to add of course, it’s a work in progress, but I think we’re doing good for docs now.
carapace|3 years ago
I'm not trying to slight Textualize (or any of the other fine TUI systems) when I say that, to me, they all seem like "fun toys". What I mean is that ncurses covers the terminal abstraction (glorified turd-polished teletype machine, literally an electric typewriter) and provides all the building blocks that make sense to provide. All these TUI projects then add an additional abstraction layer to essentially add a GUI toolkit on top.
For my use case, it was more work to learn and use the additional abstractions than it was to implement the behaviour I wanted in ncurses. And this was true for every TUI system I tried, in every language I tried (OCaml, C, Nim, Python).
The conclusion I came to was that TUI systems are essentially nerd toys (I mean that in an affectionate way), one gets "nerd-sniped" into making a TUI system and then sometimes it becomes a "real project" (Textualize has VC money?) but in ten or twenty years... ncurses will still be there, eh?
(My lil tui side-quest got started when a terminal text editor project went by here on HN and I thought, "How hard could it be...?" Nerd-sniped by a classic: write your own text editor. The thing that saved me was that, as I said, I bounced off of the TUI sub-universe into the arms of ncurses, and then I realized that all my design ideas were basically vim, and that snapped me out of it. Whew! Close call!)
From my POV the important thing is that the Textualize folks are having fun. (I don't mean that in a snark way, I'm sincere!)
ibz|3 years ago
For these new-fangled frameworks though... Like Textualize? You have to use Python. Fancy Golang? You have to go with Glamour. Rust fan? Wait a couple of months and there will be something equally awesome.
They are all awesome except they are sort of "competing standards" and you never know how long they will be maintained in the future. Whereas ncurses works in every language and will always be around.
davepdotorg|3 years ago
Perhaps it’ll lead one or two more people down the path to eventually learning ncurses (or S-Lang, which I tended to use back in the day).