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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?

#211

Post by windexh8er »

kjs3 wrote: post #168
kjellsbells wrote: post #115

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 t…

Genuine Parts (large US based auto parts retail) is similar. The folks working there are working on turbo muscle memory and navigate the system impressively quickly.

Way back in the mid 90s I helped convert one of the largest auto salvage yards from dumb terminals (Wyse) to NT machines using terminal emulation. The sales folks went from having been limited to physical desk space or multiple terminals to multiplexing serial over Ethernet.

These folks were fast in the TUI but extending them to 2-4x the workspace was an insane productivity booster. This yard ended up being bought out in part to how we managed to extend email and virtual terminal capabilities and was the basis for the footprint of the LKQ brand at the time. I'm not sure how any web app could compete. TUIs are amazing workflow enablers.

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

#212

Post by imroot »

kjellsbells wrote: post #115

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 t…

From the best of my recollection, Lowe's runs Linux internally, Costco Is IBM.

Did some work for Lowe's Home improvement and their PXE booting thin clients in the early 2000's.

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

#213

Post by Zambyte »

solardev wrote: post #6

In 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…

Regarding the shortcut navigation, I use an extension called which-key[0] on Emacs for that. I believe there is a similar package with the same name for vim / nvim too.

[0] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

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

#214

Post by amake »

davisr wrote: post #200
kqr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair if you're trying to start Emacs in a terminal instead of letting Emacs control its output on its own you've already gone off the beaten path. The thing you want (the helpful mouse interface) is the Emacs default. The funny command-line flag is what makes it weird. Just don't use that flag.

But then it's not a TUI anymore, which is the whole point of this exercise.

"TUI" is "text(ual) user interface", not "terminal user interface". If the UI is (primarily?) made of text (which it is in Emacs' GUI mode) then it doesn't need to be in the terminal.

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

#216

Post by js8 »

bitwize wrote: post #71

I've been faffing about with mainframe stuff lately using Hercules. So I'm going to nominate ISPF on mainframes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISPF Because the IBM mainframe world was late to the time-sharing party (ISPF was based on TSO, the Time-Sharing Option for System/360 and System/370, because the default mode for mainframes was batch processing from punched cards), and because IBM's 3270 terminal used screen-…

Compared to ISPF, some people also loved XEDIT or Roscoe for their ability to integrate adhoc scripting with TUI.

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

#217

Post by qiakai »

qiakai wrote: post #215

I recommend x-cmd, which uses shell and awk to implement many tui interactive tools (gh, gt, theme, cd, ls, hn, etc.), and is also a package manager that supports the download of many tui software. Very user-friendly. https://www.x-cmd.com/

Also very small

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

#218

Post by TheSmiddy »

bee_rider wrote: post #154
bashinator wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`ncdu` is the single best tool I've ever found for tracking down high-disk-usage directories deep in the filesystem. Run it with the `-x` flag to prevent it from crossing mounts.

Better than the kdirstat/windirstat family?

it works in the terminal on a headless server

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

#219

Post by toast0 »

al_borland wrote: post #194
kjellsbells wrote: post #115

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 t…

I’ve always wondered about this. I get that a keyboard driven text interface can be extremely fast for an experienced user. However, when I think about a lot of the places I see them, they are retail jobs with what I can only assume is high turnover. The text interface has to have a much higher learning curve, which I would think would only pay off for jobs people work in for a long time.

Some of these jobs you simply need to be fast or find something else to do. When you're new, your supervisor is near by, and you learn how to do the easy things, and ask the super for help with exceptions.

If you spend a couple 8 hour days doing returns or checking people into flights or whatever, you'll get good at the regular stuff and the usual exceptions. Or you won't and maybe there's something else you can do.

Most of the time, the real tricks are knowing how to move to the other fields when it's not obviously tab, and what the button is to get into the exception menu. And then learning the layouts to scan the page for what you need.

On a mouse driven system you can usually click into the fields you need, but if you need to, it's usually gonna be slow.

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

#220

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

skywal_l wrote: post #17

Well you have the MS-DOS era Borland tools. Someone took the time to rewrite it as a cross-platform open source library: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision Edit: Not a rewrite, but a port. See comments below.

FreePascal comes with an TUI IDE in the Borland tradition (not to mention Lazarus): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Pascal#/media/File:FPIDE_...
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