I think the tui is perhaps 80% of the way there for these things now:
- there’s some rudimentary windows support so that you can just double-click the bitcoin-tui icon and have it talk to your bitcoind; having a “config” window so you could choose a different network, or rpc port etc without editing a config file directly would probably be useful as well though
- on Linux you can launch and stop bitcoind directly from the tui
- you can control the tui’s access/risk-profile (via the tui’s --allow-rpc or bitcoind’s rpcwhitelist)
- you can add custom monitoring via lua scripts, without needing to recompile (eg slow block monitoring)
- you can do a decent job of viewing your wallet
For me, it’s already better than the qt gui, mainly due to these three features:
- I can connect/disconnect from a running daemon without interrupting it
- I can use it over an ssh connection to a remote daemon without it feeling slow
- I can very easily setup custom monitoring things where previously I used python or bitcoin-cli/jq and as well as being easier to do, the result is nicer.
I guess in addition, the RPC boundary layer also makes it much easier to iterate on bitcoin-tui than it does on the GUI, because bugs in the tui code don’t have any more possibility of corrupting consensus logic than misusing bitcoin-cli already did.