DESQview for DOS was an amazing way to add some multi-tasking capabilities into an otherwise limited environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
DESQview was pivotal for running multi-line BBSes.
Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
201–210 of 299 posts
Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the old days, the primary users of many mainframe UIs were the data entry team (almost universally female). Sitting in large offices with rows of desks and a huge clock on the front wall, they weren't interacting with customers, they were transcribing from sales sheets, order forms, application forms, etc. prepared by someone else. There was no great need for user friendliness, because the only users were in…
Mice are the problem, not the rest of the GUI. Keyboards are just faster once you learn them.
https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/ - "Unlike claims by either keyboard or mouse advocates, when I do experiments myself, the results are mixed. Some tasks are substantially faster if I use the keyboard and some are substantially faster if I use the mouse. Moreover, most of the results are easily predictable (when the results are similar, the prediction is that it would be hard to predict)."
Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those who are familiar with using the *nix du command, ncdu is like a nice step up. Finding what is using your disk space naturally requires repeatedly descending into directories and checking what is using up most space. So having TUI for it makes a lot of sense. Thanks for listing it.
du -h|sort -h goes a really long way
ncdu is the next step when you've got as far as you can with `du -h | sort -n`
Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
#204Oxide computer has a really interesting one. This probably hits all of the big points: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1272104
Thats a whole lot of text to try to ferret out what "really interesting one" you're talking about.
Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
#205In stark contrast to most GNU/*nix tools, I really liked MS-DOS's edit.com text editor. Unlike emacs or vim or even nano, it didn't have a bunch of invisible shortcut keys, just a Windows-like drop-down menu system (but rendered in DOS). You could easily browse through the menu hierarchy, but still memorize certain shortcuts that you often use (just like Windows). In later versions you could even use the mouse to sel…
I really wish edit.com still existed for Windows and was built in. Every now and then I need to do some stuff on a Windows machine and find myself wishing for a simple terminal editor.
A Microsoft employee recently (~6 months) opened a Github issue to discuss a command line editor for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440
> "Thank you so much to everyone for engaging with this feature exploration! Your passion has generated a ton of excitement in our own team, and I’m happy to share our proposed direction, which is that we will work with Malcolm Smith (malxau), the maintainer of Yedit, to ship Edit in Windows! We plan to do this by forking the Yedit code to a new OSS repo on GitHub, under Microsoft (like terminal or powertoys)."
YEdit being an MIT licensed open-source recreation of the MS-DOS 5 editor, by a Microsoft employee: http://www.malsmith.net/edit/
Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't remember all of them, but the abbreviations sort of became a running joke amongst me and my coworkers; specifically we would use them for nicknames of managers we didn't like. None of them were vulgar or anything, but for example we had taken to calling one of the managers "McNugs" because he stole a bunch of chicken nuggets (like literally a whole box, not just one or two from the line), tried to claim that…
Is the inventory tracked so closely that you can detect a missing box of McNugs?
Sort of; by "box", I mean it was like a 40-50lbs crate full of McNuggets. I didn't mean like six nugget box.
They noticed because we ran out of them during a rush hour and the owner of the franchise was confused because we should have had another box.
Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
#207Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
#208I'm a maintainer of Ratatui (a rust TUI crate). Here's a few links https://ratatui.rs/showcase/apps/ https://github.com/ratatui-org/awesome-ratatui https://discord.com/channels/1070692720437383208/10729061831... (made with ratatui channel on our discord server) We encourage our users to use https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs to build out demos that look neat. My particular favorite of the bunch (from a look and fee…
That’s a great name btw. :)
Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
#209Git gui in terminal
Re: Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
#210WordPerfect is an interesting example: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/wordperfect.html WordStar is another one, used by George RR Martin et al: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/words...
I used the TUI WordPerfect for SCO Unix/Xenix on various serial terminals and telnet/ssh connections for years. I still miss it for heads-down cranking out text.
Available on Linux still...