Wayland this, Liquid Glass that – but what if you just want a nice, comforting text-based environment? Sure, you can just boot straight into a terminal, or perhaps get fancy about it with Screen or whatever, but what if you want a text-based environment, but don’t want to give up windows, menus, your mouse? How about a graphical user interface made up entirely of text?
Twin is text-based windowing environment with mouse support, window manager, terminal emulator, networked clients and the ability to attach/detach mode displays on-the-fly.
It supports a variety of displays:
↫ The Twin GitHub page
- plain text terminals: Linux console, twin’s own terminal emulator, and any termcap/ncurses compatible terminal;
- X11, where it can be used as a multi-window xterm;
- itself (you can display a twin on another twin);
- twdisplay, a general network-transparent display client, used to attach/detach more displays on-the-fly.
It looks exactly like what you’d think this would look like, and I find it absolutely fascinating. I’m not entirely sure how usable it is or who or what use case it’s optimised for, but I adore the dedication to the cause. It works on both Linux and FreeBSD, and most likely other systems as well.
Looks like Tandy/Radio Shack’s Personal Deskmate! I HAVE TO DOWNLOAD IT AND INSTALL!!!!
A fellow Tandy 1000 ejoyer?
You gotta love it when a leather company (Tandy) puts the guts of an IBM PCjr in a PC case and dominates the PC market with it. The PCjr was a total flop. Using the same tech, the Tandy 1000 was the best selling computer in the world–bigger than the Commodore 64. Amazing.
Sadly, VGA and the Sound Blaster caught them off guard as did all the big box clones you could put them in. Tandy went from first to last pretty quickly.
That’s right! Had a Tandy 1000EX, and later on TX. Learned Basic programming from pages of code from PC magazine. Sierra games such as Space Quest, Kings Quest, and Leisure suit Larry were tops. Along with AOL, was Sierra Online BBS and Compuserve. Just fired up Procomm, and connected vua my 1200 Baud modem at the time. AT commands were the standard. You have brought back memories to my retired brain. LOL
I am a big fan of TUI (text-based user interfaces) but I do not really get fully text based windowing systems for the modern day.
And if you are going to have a fully text-based desktop, why the stacking window manager pattern? The screenshot on Github is a mess. Tandy DeskMate, mentioned in another comment, managed text windows better 40 years ago.
I have been playing with Niri, a scrolling/tiling Wayland compositor. It is a great environment for having lots of terminals and TUIs open. In addition to mouse control, it is likely Niri has better keyboard controls than Twin. And paired with things like Waybar and Fuzzel, Niri is basically a TUI itself. But it is also a full Wayland compositor where a window can contain a fully GUI app when that makes more sense. It is hard to watch a video or edit an image in an all text interface.
https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri
If you like a good TUI, check out Terminal.Gui:
https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui
I will have to play with Twin at some point. Hopefully it is so good I have to come back and admit I was wrong.
Tiling TUI makes indeed way more sense to me. Stacking/hiding windows is a mess, text or graphic.
Yeah, and if you really want to push the non distraction/minimalism trend to an extreme, you can also select this screen : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hV8xfhdk7c
Seems a great thing.
Possibly will be easy enough to compile it under MacOS as well, making it finally an usable system.
Seems to be officially supported:
Thanks, I missed that.
I built and ran it on an ARM Mac (M1 Pro, Sequoia) and it worked fine under Terminal and Kitty. Termcap is set to “linux” by default so anything that needs a lot of multibyte glyphs or more than 16 colors is going to need some fiddling.
I have been using Twin for at least 30 years. i also use dvtm, green, mplayer, vlc-nox teapot, wyrd, remind, canto and ranger.
as long as you run in the framebuffer you do not need X or wayland.
Tha main hero is the package unifier, UNP.
My first experience with computers was back in the day when it wasn’t unusual for people to run MS-DOS programs, so Text UIs occupy a special spot in my heart, they give off “serious software” vibes in a way that modern software just doesn’t.