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Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

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Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#111

Post by sim7c00 »

sgbeal wrote: post #19
jmclnx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, I found it much easier to create TUIs on DOS than on a UN*X system. I still have a hard time with curses. Zortech c on DOS had a small set of screen functions, disp_*(). These are enhanced printf(), scanf(), getc() type functions by adding cursor positioning on an 80x25 screen. Pretty basic but you could create nice applications with these basic functions in Zortech c. Granted, on DOS the screen size d…

> I still have a hard time with curses. FWIW, _everybody_ has a hard time with curses. That's why it's (aptly) named "curses!"

haha never put 1 and 2 together. i guess these days its either something CSS or curses. cursed style sheets? :') maybe someone can do everyone a solid and make a GUI to design TUIs ? hahah

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#115

Post by kjellsbells »

If you are in the US, pick a slow day and chat to the customer service people at Lowes or Costco. Both stores use TUI interfaces for their instore service apps, and boy are they fast with them. They reserve GUI things for the self service point of sale systems and keep the TUI for cases where speed matters. I suspect that these apps might once have been mainframe hosted (in other words, screen-oriented, with the PC terminal doing local processing and not sending the request to the server until the user hits Send) but of course those days are long gone and I imagine that at worst they are running on a TN3270 emulator and more likely they just expose a remote app in a browser or RDP session.

Some things I observe from watching these apps is that navigation clues are always present, keymappings are static from screen to screen (F1 is always help, say), and the UI is such that the user is always in control of the application state.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#116

Post by mr_mitm »

duckmysick wrote: post #106
mr_mitm wrote: post #40

I use vim, mutt, tig, newsboat, jless (if that counts) pretty much daily. Also a TUI Confluence client which I wrote and which I am the only user of as far as I know. Navigating Confluence becomes a breeze.

I'm not using Confluence anymore, but I imagine others would find your TUI useful. Have you considered publishing it?

I have, and I did: https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/Congruence

I consider it MeWare: written for me, but published for others to use because why not? But don't expect a polished product.

Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?

#119

Post by Izkata »

sim7c00 wrote: post #111
sgbeal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still have a hard time with curses. FWIW, _everybody_ has a hard time with curses. That's why it's (aptly) named "curses!"

haha never put 1 and 2 together. i guess these days its either something CSS or curses. cursed style sheets? :') maybe someone can do everyone a solid and make a GUI to design TUIs ? hahah

CSS used to support the "tty" media type for terminal output (like for the lynx browser).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media

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