Everyone seems to be very excited about this framework, and while it looks very impressive, I don't inderstand the impetus for it.
Why do I need the terminal to become an interactive visual app? Why not use the tools that are designed for visual interactive applications- like GUIs ?
I am on the same boat: just can't see why someone would want to turn the terminal into what is basically a GUI with just poorer graphis?!
Am I completely missing something? Should I start thinking of replacing my desktop environment with a terminal emulator that does everything, including displaying images, videos, windows etc to gain some advantage I am unaware of?
It's a least common denominator thing: there a places where you can easily run a terminal app but not a browser/electron, which are probably the next level up in the portability/fidelity tradeoff.
It's really handy if your "window manager" is actually in your terminal (say, you use tmux). Otherwise you've got two layers of "window manager" to deal with—your terminal multiplexer, and your actual window manager.
Why might one use something like tmux instead of relying on Rectangle or a tilling window manager or what have you?
1) The terminal is far easier to gain access to cross-platform than any GUI window manager, so if you can keep most of your workflow in the terminal, you can work just about anywhere. You get it out-of-the-box basically everywhere but Windows (assuming we mean a Unixy terminal, here, not cmd or powershell) but it's very easy to gain access to a unixy terminal there, too, these days.
2) Maybe you are constrained to the terminal for some reason, as in the case of a remote server that doesn't have X installed.
Maybe you don't have access to a graphics server, or just want to add a small interface to a certain part of a bigger application/script that works in the terminal. For example, apt will show you TUIs sometimes when it asks more complex configuration questions.
>Why do I need the terminal to become an interactive visual app? Why not use the tools that are designed for visual interactive applications- like GUIs ?
Because those have become so shit the developers want to leave them.
The problem is that the developers who want to leave them are the ones who made them shit and haven't learned any lessons.
It's the cycle of life, the best thing to do is to completely ignore it, in 5 years everyone will have left and you'll be able to pick the two or three good ideas they brought with them.
Not only developers, but I’ve read a research where a POS system was upgraded from a TUI to a GUI, and while new hires enjoyed the new system, experienced ones disliked due to the reduced performance.
There is also an old research showing that a small delay in the response time has a big impact on the productivity [1]. The keyboard only interface and high performance/low latency can be an excellent choice for power users/users who care about productivity.
In theory we can have all that using regular GUIs, but almost no developer/UX cares about this today. The TUI constraints ends up being an advantage for getting things done in some situations.
Of course we're now losing the rapid response time in terminals too because we need to buffer everything to make sure it's painted perfectly. That people think GPU acceleration is a good idea in a terminal has left me not only baffled but depressed for the future of a technology that was too lame to ruin (until recently). But here we are.
Why do I need the terminal to become an interactive visual app? Why not use the tools that are designed for visual interactive applications- like GUIs ?