No, friend-o, I'm not saying htop and emacs are show-off projects --- though everyone I know who uses Emacs (myself included) uses graphical emacs.

My point is that most developer tooling is CLI, not TUI; most developer tools are shop jigs, not packaged tools. Though most of the packaged tools: also CLIs!

All of them can very quickly be made into native UIs, though.

You'll get further on HN not calling people "very dishonest".

Depending on the setting and the adversary, obscurity measures can raise costs by a material or immaterial amount.

Obscurity measures usually also impose costs on defenders (and, transitively, on the intended users of the system). Those costs are different than they are for adversaries (usually: substantially lower). They might or might not be material.

Your general goal is to asymmetrically raise costs on the adversary.

Seen that way, it's usually pretty easy to reason about whether obscurity is worth pursuing or not. Don't do it if it doesn't materially raise costs for attackers, or, even if it does, if it doesn't raise costs way less for defenders and users.

What trips people up in forums like this is that we're used to dealing with security problems framed in settings where we can impose \infty costs on attackers: foreclosing all known avenues of attack (to something like a mathematical certainty, and stipulating that computer science discoveries may change the cost function tomorrow). In those settings, all obscurity measures have relatively immaterial attacker costs associated. But it's still the same underlying problem! And, in the real world, we're actually rarely operating in model situations where we really can impose \infty costs on attackers.

I am, in a proverbial sense, buying puts on Electron.

But that's changed drastically in the last few months. I spent the weekend doing SwiftUI stuff with Claude, with a lot of success. It's going to get much easier to ship fast, solid, native UIs for things, and native UI is both very fun to build and also attractive to ordinary users.

(Fun green field for doing interesting UI work: do native UI for remote server stuff, like an htop UI that uses some dialect of SSH to fetch remote data.)

I think modern TUIs are a blip. A big, important blip. But a blip. The age of the Orc is over. The time of the Human Interface Guideline has come.

(That's not to say SPLC couldn't have fucked up and crossed the line, just that the general description given upthread of what they were doing did not in fact describe a violation of law).