> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.
That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)
In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.
Load time tolerance is proportional to session length and focus required. People put up with GTA V Online taking tens of minutes to load the "micro"transaction store contents [1] because when they sit down to play online they are going to spend a couple hours in near 100% focus.
Compare with a mobile game, even a 3D one, where sessions are usually in the tens of minutes themselves, a lot more effort is spent optimising load times and it can be a competitive advantage.
Lagrange cold-starts in roughly a second on my M1 Mac. That's roughly the same as Terminal.app on the same hardware.
Games tend to take a lot of time to start up because they need to preload heavyweight data, such as textures, models, maps, sounds, video. You don't need any of that in a desktop application.
That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)
In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.
Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.