> They are not 70s products but they look like 70s products
I'm not sure how you could have a TUI that didn't look old. For serious applications, you have to build TUIs assuming the worst - that the user has no colors or special keys. Sure, some terminals can display bitmapped images with 24-bit color, but you can't depend on that, especially for anything running over SSH or within Tmux, screen, emacs, (neo)vim, or some combination of these. These can create some very obscure bugs related to colors and keybindings, so you can't assume every key will work as expected or that your users will have color at all (I disable Vim syntax highlighting over SSH because it tends to demolish its performance, for example). This is why many TUIs are 16-color and use just ASCII characters - you don't know if the user can display emojis or if it'll show up as a garbled mess.
GUI applications (including text-based ones like gVim and emacs) have a lot more flexibility because they can control more than they can in a terminal and can guarantee 8- or 24-bit color instead of having to hope for 16-color support.
> Why when typing "ls" not also have a tiny folder icon near the directories (you are already going into the hassle of adding colors anyway, a little icon would make it more obvious which are folders and which are files when you are looking at a huge list)
That would probably break a lot of scripts. I just alias "l" to "ls -l" so I can see the permissions (which has a "d" to indicate directories).
> For serious applications, you have to build TUIs assuming the worst - that the user has no colors or special keys.
Realistically, what are the chances of this happening nowadays and how worth is it supporting such users?
> That would probably break a lot of scripts.
If an icon would break scripts, so would having colors, but it doesn't since ls knows when it outputs to a terminal or to a pipe and adjusts the output accordingly. But this misses the point, it could be another commands like vls (visual ls) or whatever, the point is the ability to use more than ASCII text.
> I just alias "l" to "ls -l" so I can see the permissions (which has a "d" to indicate directories).
An icon is more distinguishable from a single letter and using the -l view would not take advantage of any horizontal space you have.
I'm not sure how you could have a TUI that didn't look old. For serious applications, you have to build TUIs assuming the worst - that the user has no colors or special keys. Sure, some terminals can display bitmapped images with 24-bit color, but you can't depend on that, especially for anything running over SSH or within Tmux, screen, emacs, (neo)vim, or some combination of these. These can create some very obscure bugs related to colors and keybindings, so you can't assume every key will work as expected or that your users will have color at all (I disable Vim syntax highlighting over SSH because it tends to demolish its performance, for example). This is why many TUIs are 16-color and use just ASCII characters - you don't know if the user can display emojis or if it'll show up as a garbled mess.
GUI applications (including text-based ones like gVim and emacs) have a lot more flexibility because they can control more than they can in a terminal and can guarantee 8- or 24-bit color instead of having to hope for 16-color support.
> Why when typing "ls" not also have a tiny folder icon near the directories (you are already going into the hassle of adding colors anyway, a little icon would make it more obvious which are folders and which are files when you are looking at a huge list)
That would probably break a lot of scripts. I just alias "l" to "ls -l" so I can see the permissions (which has a "d" to indicate directories).