João Costa @JD557@blog.joaocosta.eu Follow

Portuguese software engineer at Kevel.

My instance is running on a small server so please #nobot

Web

https://www.joaocosta.eu/

GitHub

https://github.com/JD557

Twitter

https://twitter.com/JD557

Itch.io

https://jd557.itch.io

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readbeanicecream's avatar
readbeanicecream
@readbeanicecream@mastodon.social

The Older I Get, The More Terminal I Become

As I age, I find myself gravitating more towards CLI and TUI applications that can be run from a terminal emulator. And honestly, I am not sure why.

https://readbeanicecream.surge.sh/2025/06/20/the-older-i-get-the-more-terminal-i-become/

#indieweb #blog #blogging #smallweb #linux #technology #tech #cli #tui

The Older I Get, The More Terminal I Become - ReadBeanIceCream readbeanicecream.surge.sh
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João Costa
@JD557@blog.joaocosta.eu

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@readbeanicecream@mastodon.social

On theory that I have is time efficiency. [...] Typing just feels faster to me and much more efficient than swiping and dragging.

I would argue that it's not just typing, especially when it comes to TUIs. Text based interfaces are way snappier than modern GUIs.

Modern UIs are filled with animations, loading screens and other small delays that you just don't get in TUIs.

Now, I'm not saying that "Old UIs good, Modern UIs bad". There are good reasons for animations (e.g. helping discoverability, feedback on what's happening), but there are definitely trade-offs, and at a certain level of proficiency you just want things to happen ASAP so that you can send the next command.

As a side note, I find it quite amusing to pick older hardware, because of how snappy the UI feels, but once in a while it just slows to a crawl... You can really feel when the machine has to access something in disk or do some heavy computation. 😄

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readbeanicecream
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@JD557 Agreed. Something has to be said about being able to log in, run a few commands, and log out.

That's literally what I just did to fix that typo you caught. 😁

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Jeremy Kun
@j2kun@mathstodon.xyz

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@readbeanicecream I once read a long article by someone who taught boomers how to use a terminal, and the author made all these analogies between how people do things in real life and how terminals work. One example was something like being able to put a running process in the background and have it alert you when it finished, which was similar to putting a tea kettle on the stove and going to do something else until you hear the whistle. I wish I could find that article again because I found it vindicating as a long-time terminal enjoyer :)

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readbeanicecream
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@j2kun Pretty good analogy. I have kicked off a process and grabbed a cup of coffee. Or set a cron job and went on vacation.

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