Below is a GIF of
tsk, my pocket Finnish-to-English dictionary,
running in my terminal emulator of choice under Linux.
It’s what the kids call a
TUI,
a graphical program that just happens to drive its graphics
using terminal graphics instead of graphics-graphics.
Insert GIF here.
You can probably tell that this program fits neatly into the
“home-cooked meal”
clade of programs. There is a very straightforward problem I want solved -
fast, single-executable-portable dictionary lookup, with a few conveniences
for the busy language learner layered on top. I am quite happy with tsk in
its current iteration and don’t plan to add much more to it anytime soon.
It would still save me a lot of time and hassle if I were the only person who
could use it.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I built a static Windows .exe file from the Go code, dropped it onto a Window’s laptop to test, and it just … worked. No changes at all necessary. Windows just opened up an ancient looking terminal emulator of its own, and happily ran my app just as if I were on Linux. I was bewildered; cross-platform GUIs are well-known for being fiddly time sinks. And yet this worked right out of the box! The story was the same on my wife’s Macbook.
I think there’s both a technological and a cultural explanation for this. The technological explanation is straightforward: Terminals are just much, much simpler environments than arbitrary graphics in arbitrary rectangles. Always have been. Every major operating system comes with some kind of terminal emulator built in, almost like a secret compatibility layer for those who are in the know.
The cultural explanation is much more interesting to me. I get the sense that people who write TUIs, both now and in days of yore, tend to be functionality-first backend engineers. They don’t want any more bells and whistles than they actually need to get the job done. By choosing the weakest possible environment first that satisfies their needs, they buy themselves a much easier time getting the damn thing to work in novel computational ecosystems. This does not actually have to be the case - one could imagine a terminal environment as rich as the modern-day web browser. But, historically, that’s just not quite how the cookie crumbled.