> an icon in the dock, system notifications, matching light/dark theme, etc
Textual apps will eventually support this and other OS integrations exposed by the browser. It's never going to look native, given the terminal origins. But it will be possible for them to play better with the OS. And when we add PWA support, they will have a more desktop look and feel.
SSH is an advantage when running in the terminal. In the browser the advantage is that you can deploy them where you couldn't run a web server. Think IOT, routers, lab equipment. Or just cloud servers, where you want a backend to work with the local file system.
Another advantage is development speed. Textual has a learning curve which is far less steep that a regular web stack. It allows non-web developers to build bespoke apps.
I also think that TUIs can be more attractive than GUIs in some scenarios. Not because they look better, but you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven. TUIs are a more natural fit for that kind of interface.
> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.
That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)
In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.
Load time tolerance is proportional to session length and focus required. People put up with GTA V Online taking tens of minutes to load the "micro"transaction store contents [1] because when they sit down to play online they are going to spend a couple hours in near 100% focus.
Compare with a mobile game, even a 3D one, where sessions are usually in the tens of minutes themselves, a lot more effort is spent optimising load times and it can be a competitive advantage.
Lagrange cold-starts in roughly a second on my M1 Mac. That's roughly the same as Terminal.app on the same hardware.
Games tend to take a lot of time to start up because they need to preload heavyweight data, such as textures, models, maps, sounds, video. You don't need any of that in a desktop application.
Textual apps will eventually support this and other OS integrations exposed by the browser. It's never going to look native, given the terminal origins. But it will be possible for them to play better with the OS. And when we add PWA support, they will have a more desktop look and feel.
SSH is an advantage when running in the terminal. In the browser the advantage is that you can deploy them where you couldn't run a web server. Think IOT, routers, lab equipment. Or just cloud servers, where you want a backend to work with the local file system.
Another advantage is development speed. Textual has a learning curve which is far less steep that a regular web stack. It allows non-web developers to build bespoke apps.
I also think that TUIs can be more attractive than GUIs in some scenarios. Not because they look better, but you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven. TUIs are a more natural fit for that kind of interface.