The https://ratatui.rs/ TUI framework has a backend called Ratzilla (https://github.com/orhun/ratzilla) that lets you build web applications which look and feel like TUIs.
Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
161–170 of 315 posts
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#162If it’s survived this long, it likely because it has years of small fixes to make it reliable and useful, and more than anything—- predictable for the user. Modernizing will roll some of that back; I would only consider it if there’s a plan to be around for the years it will take to get good again.
Eh, I bet a lot of this stuff is running on some old SCO box held together with ducttape and prayers, because the vendor is long gone/dead.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode. GUIs can have keyboard shortcuts too. I'm an artist and I work two-handed: right hand moves the stylus around the screen, left hand floats around the keyboard and changes tools, summons control panels, etc. Whenever I try a different program than the one I'm used to, and have to poke at icons with my right hand because I…
We solved this with mnemonics (underlined letter is the shortcut) but then got rid of them for some reason
I love the system in Autodesk Animator (now: https://github.com/AnimatorPro). Every menu item or button currently on the screen always have a unique initial letter. There is no need to highlight or underline anything. Amazingly this was done without having to use any too obscure labels (but I doubt it would be fun to try to translate it to other languages). Almost every function is two or three single letter key-presses away, and after using the application for a while you will have memorized more and more of those.
Some frequently used functions have their own special single-key shortcuts as well, so instead of having to press C-P (to open the Clip menu and then select Paste) you can just press the ' key, saving the user a key-press every time they do that.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I teach at a summer camp once that had custom web app for roll such that it displayed one name at a time to call out and to mark it as present you had to type their given name in a box, otherwise click next with empty input for absent
Somebody needs to be fired for that sort of UI... I've probably made that sort of UI without realizing it...
False absence, is better than false presence. Especially with kids.
The UX is optimizing for accuracy over ease of use, and in this case is likely intentionally difficult to use.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#165Fry's Electronics used to have a powerful TUI for getting parts from the cage, the employees could hammer everything in and hit print and turn around to do something else while the screens were still loading.
Later they had some GUI that was used to open ... a terminal of some sort for the same TUI. The GUI made it slower, somehow.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#166Costco runs on TUI. They force you into minimal design and uncomplicated workflows. I bet someone is going to say you need servicenow to manage all this in an easier way. Please don’t listen to that person
Love walking by the AS/400 terminal emulator screens after checkout. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I will say that these systems take time and effort to learn. You have to commit these UI paths to memory, which isn't too hard, but in order to be maximally effective, you also have to memorize a lot of product metadata. One thing that often gets lost in the discussion of TUIs vs GUIs is that this is also true of GUIs. You have to know which icon to click, and it's not always in the same place, and not always label…
The cool thing about TUIs is that everything has an explicit label because it has to be this way. On the system I use, every menu item was prefixed with a number. You punch in that number on the keyboard and you're in that menu. Just absolutely beautiful functionality
I had a summer job in a place with one of these. When I started, I was like “how does this guy know the 15 digit number for these screws?” By the end, I know the code for screws in general, the code for popular types, metric/imperial, and then it was like length and size. The numbers flashed up as well, so you wouldn’t have to memorize anything, but you quickly didn’t need to see the numbers for popular items.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#168A fairly large GDS company has replaced their old “green screen” terminals with a web app that contains the same green screen but with syntax highlighting and hyperlinks inline controls that appear and other quality of life improvements.
This is something I've wondered about. I started out in the green screen era and remember how amazingly quick those UIs were to navigate. I don't see any reason why we couldn't replicate much of that UX and development model, but deliver it to web browsers with graphical capabilities in the parts of the system that need it.
I feel like mouse+keyboard is a step down in speed of use for many tasks, but I do wonder about touch screens. For some things, touch screens can be plenty fast and the UI adapts to the task.
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode. GUIs can have keyboard shortcuts too. I'm an artist and I work two-handed: right hand moves the stylus around the screen, left hand floats around the keyboard and changes tools, summons control panels, etc. Whenever I try a different program than the one I'm used to, and have to poke at icons with my right hand because I…
We solved this with mnemonics (underlined letter is the shortcut) but then got rid of them for some reason
I recently rediscovered that I can do GUI menu things on the keyboard in apps like VLC. Feels like a magic trick -- the best of both worlds. Was it the move to phones that did it? Or did most people not use alt shortcuts?
Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
#170Many (most?) older retail businesses still use TUIs. They're reliable, consistent, and orders of magnitude faster than GUI systems. When I worked ar Sherwin Williams, I got good enough with the TUI that customers could rattle off their orders while I punch it into the computer in real time. It's absolutely crazy that a well designed TUI is so much faster. It turns out that if you never change the UI and every menu it…
When we built systems in the early 90's (non web GUI), typical requirements were that login/startup would at most take a few seconds and any user action would have to be satisfied with sub second response time. I often think about that when I am waiting for the third SSO redirection to complete or the web page to complete its 200 web requests after a single click. We gained a lot but efficiency seems to have taken a backseat in many cases.