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Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

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Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#221

Post by jamal-kumar »

andix wrote: post #184
H1Supreme wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://www.burtonsys.com/download/dbf2csv.php Man, this would have came in handy when I was trying to extract data from .dbf files. Ended up writing something in Go while referencing the dBase IV spec. Lots of trial and error as I recall.

PHP used to have dBase database support. Also older version of Excel can just open dBase. LibreOffice seems to support it too.

https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/scalc/guide/d...

Hahaha this woulda saved me some time. We considered porting the app to be a web app but after some time it was obvious that wouldn't have been as good

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#222

Post by Scoundreller »

bitwize wrote: post #202
PunchyHamster wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing stopping someone from designing GUI stemming from same rules. It just won't "look pretty" and be easy to sell to the suits. There is also trend with "modern" UI/UX to focus near entirety of effort on user's first few minutes and first few hours with a software, while near zero thought is being put on users having to use given piece of software for hours at end, day in, day out

I definitely see cash register/POS systems like this out in the wild, replete with ugly fonts, Windows 3.x style buttons, and even F-key legends at the bottom. So somebody somewhere is thinking of the poor cashiers. The entire GUI was sold on it being easy to use for beginners. There's a reason why keybindings are today called "shortcuts": Steve Jobs's diktat was that the primary means of giving commands to the Mac w…

I still work on a system where it sometimes says to press F17 to do something…

And no, we don’t have the glorious keyboards from that time :( just standard 104s

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#224

Post by Scoundreller »

mrweasel wrote: post #210
egypturnash wrote: post #102

Earlier 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…

You see this a lot with videos editors. A professional video editor flies around in their software of choice like an sales person in a TUI. Both are inherently proficient with their tool, to the extend that it's hard to graps what's actually happening on screen. We also see this with editors and IDE. Some people cruise around Emacs or Vim, while other hit a few keys and Visual Studio or IntelliJ will refactor 500 lin…

> The TUIs are a little funny, because often people can navigate and input faster than the program can render. So you vaguely see a screen change, a menu move or an overlay pop up, only to instantly disappear. The user doesn't need to know what's happening on screen, because they trust their fingers and the system to do the right thing.

I learned this while creating some autohotkey scripts: I could have the macro click before the button was shown on the screen.

This also created some problems where users would unintentionally hit their scroll wheel after clicking and change a 1 to a 7 on the next screen before it even appeared. That wasn’t good…

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#228

Post by rlucia »

Ah I am still running such a thing: a wonderful piece of software I wrote in the 90s w/ FoxBase.

But here’s the nice thing: I converted everything in a Flask app with React frontend.

The nicest thing is that besides using a modern relational DB, I write everything to keep old db files synced so that I can still run the old app in DosBox…and keep the new stuff in Docker.

It works, flawlessly:-)

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#229

Post by endgame »

c22 wrote: post #156
ilaksh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right to point out the speed, but it is just not true that GUIs can't be fast. You can have screens that load quickly and shortcut keys etc. You just have to make fast navigation and data entry a high priority. The assumptions and approaches people make today mean that generally isn't the case. With a TUI there is a hard limit on the amount of data you can load and that helps as a starting point. - Often it's…

Many years ago I used a TUI retail/inventory terminal that was running in an SSH session over a painfully slow wireless link. Each keystroke came with several seconds of latency. This was not a problem, though, since I'd memorized all the important menu sequences. I could just punch in a rapid-fire string of keyboard strokes representing an entire transaction and then just wait a few moments for the screens to catch…

I think this is one of the deepest problems with modern UIs - event delivery is no longer reliable. You type "abc" and only "ac" gets delivered to the application, or "b" ends up sent to another window. Maddening.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#230

Post by whalesalad »

bombcar wrote: post #165

Fry'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.

RIP Fry’s
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