Insights from my Software Engineering Radio interview with Will McGugan
Introduction
In a recent episode of the Software Engineering Radio podcast, I interviewed Will McGugan, the creator of Rich and Textual and the CEO and founder of Textualize. Our conversation focused on building text-based user interfaces (TUIs) and command line interfaces (CLIs) using the aforementioned Python frameworks. Will explained how concepts from web technologies can be adapted for terminal applications, strategies for optimizing the performance of TUI and CLI frameworks, and the future of text-based interfaces in software development.
Insights
I’m thankful that Will took the time for this interview! Here are some key insights from it:
What makes text-based user interfaces compelling for developers?
“They tend to be very responsive and very quick and very snappy and there’s less contact switching. I mean I used to be a web developer, I kind of use the web a lot like most people do, but there’s quite a lot of contexts switching when you go between web application, browser tab, etc. But the benefits of running in the terminal is that it stays in your own flow. So it’s like everything’s in one place and it’s snappy and responsive and it comes up when you need it. It’s very quick to interact with and then it goes away as quickly when you don’t need it.”
How does bringing web technologies to the terminal improve development?
“So I come from the web world and the great thing about the web is that building user interfaces has been iterated on very rapidly for the last 10, 20 years. People have been trying new ways, new interfaces, refining it and creating new technologies to create these user interfaces. But none of that made it to the terminal. The terminal was considered a bit archaic and people used it for more simplistic outputs. So I took web technologies and essentially ported what I think is the best of them to the terminal.”
What performance strategies are crucial for smooth terminal interfaces?
“You consider the terminal to be a matrix of characters. That’s essentially all, it’s that composes all the elements that run inside the terminal and if you change it, you can build up a new frame. If you were to clear the screen, which might be obvious and then write your new screen on top of it, you get flicker because the terminal was never really designed. In a sense it was, but it’s not good at displaying user interfaces. That’s not really its primary purpose even though it can, the way around that is instead of clearing the screen, you just write the new content on top of it and do you need to change the bits of the screen which have logically changed.”
How does caching with immutable objects improve performance?
“Immutability is the opposite of mutability. Mutability means the ability to change, mutate your data. If an object isn’t mutable, it’s immutable and it can’t change and it might seem like a restriction, like you’ve got a data, you’ve got an object, you can’t change it. It feels like a restriction but it is massively beneficial. It means that when you change it, you create a new object rather than modifying the existing one. And when you do that, caching works a lot better.”
Listen
If you’re interested in learning more about Rich, Textual, and building text-based user interfaces in Python, I highly recommend listening to my interview with Will McGugan about text-based user interfaces on Software Engineering Radio! You can find it on your favorite podcast player, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or you can listen to it with this handy podcast player.