I’m being slowly forced to use a GUI at work, and it’s fine, but I simply prefer the TUI.
I use:
claude agents
Granted, I run it as a terminal tab in my editor so that I can look at files. I prefer the TUI in a tab instead of the editor’s half-assed plugin. These days, however, I mostly look at PRs in the browser.
For my personal work I still prefer to let the agent edit the local files so I can preview the changes in my editor. I avoid PRs in my personal work.
I've been building BASIC32, a retro BASIC interpreter for microcontrollers so I can flash it once and easily create lots of new projects.
What you give up with the authors approach is "read". The screen becomes write-only. There are only a few functions that require reads: getting a pixels current color and doing operations like flood fills or paints.
Because I was going for the retro feel of BASIC, I wanted to support these, so I opted for a frame buffer. It isn't as technically cool. On the RP2350, it does require low resolution and low bit rates because they often have RAM limited to KB.
If you step-up to the ESP32-S3 variants with 4MB or 8MB of RAM the frame buffer gets much easier.
It foregoes reading, I suspect (but obviously don't know for certain), for the simple reason that (if I remember right) you usually don't ever want to "read" a framebuffer, because reading the framebuffer is asking the graphics device to give you the current value of one or more pixels, and that is way slower than it being rendered to some output device.
Probably at the edge of being a good example. I recently switched to zed because of how bloated VS Code is becoming. I think it gained it’s momentum by being small, but enshitification seems to come for all software.
One possible reasons is that all of those are compiled languages vs interpreted. It doesn’t sound like much but compiling your code for three plus platforms and distributing binaries adds just enough complexity and friction to make it feel a lot more difficult.
Modern CI systems have no problem building for 15 or 20 different platforms is what you need. There's a little bit of hassle of distributing binaries but again it's not a big deal for anyone who actually puts their mind to it.
I use:
claude agents
Granted, I run it as a terminal tab in my editor so that I can look at files. I prefer the TUI in a tab instead of the editor’s half-assed plugin. These days, however, I mostly look at PRs in the browser.
For my personal work I still prefer to let the agent edit the local files so I can preview the changes in my editor. I avoid PRs in my personal work.
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