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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?

#231

Post by rossant »

epolanski wrote: post #189
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…

> and boy are they fast with them My girlfriend works in a bank and she does virtually everything in a TUI. She hates it, but I've seen her using it and she's blazing fast and I can't, as a frontend developer, imagine how a full blown application would be better.

Why does she hate it if she is so efficient with it?

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

#232

Post by memset »

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…

The navigation cues are a huge point. So many cli tools today run on cmdline flags, and it’s so frustrating to have to look them up each time. There must be a better idiom then —help or full curses applications.

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

#233

Post by Ringz »

visil wrote: post #182
Ringz wrote: post #170

I use aerc as my goto email client every day. bandwhich: Terminal bandwidth utilization tool sc-im: A very capable terminal based spreadsheet program. bpytop: Linux/OSX/FreeBSD resource monitor broot: New way to see and navigate directory trees daff: provides efficient table comparison and alignment, supporting formats like CSV and SQLite, making it essential for data analysis and synchronization tasks. It's indispen…

I used to use aerc, though mutt is more powerful. Might switch to neomutt. Sc-im is great, however may be really confusing sometimes.

Do you have examples for things that don’t work with aerc but with mutt? Since I found the template functions in aerc, for an easy example:

fs = :filter -Hsubject:"{{.SubjectBase}}"

To filter mails with the same subject. And additional the possibility to pipe everything through the shell, I don’t know what mutt can do that aerc can’t.

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

#234

Post by Krssst »

rossant wrote: post #231
epolanski wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and boy are they fast with them My girlfriend works in a bank and she does virtually everything in a TUI. She hates it, but I've seen her using it and she's blazing fast and I can't, as a frontend developer, imagine how a full blown application would be better.

Why does she hate it if she is so efficient with it?

UI inefficiencies give time for the mind to relax?

On my side I'd much rather have the efficient UI but I can imagine people getting tired if their mind is working 100% all the time.

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

#235

Post by ryancooper4 »

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…

If one were to start a project from scratch today, with the goal of having such a hyper-efficient TUI, similar to the Lowes/Costco ones, to be accessible via SSH/Telnet/locally... are there frameworks out there to use? Would my best bet still be ncurses? Are there simpler alternatives?

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

#236

Post by ykonstant »

gattilorenz wrote: post #230
tetraca wrote: post #18

QuickBASIC or even Visual Basic 1 immediately come to mind. They have good, discoverable navigation and documentation. I have no idea where you'd be able to find it since it's a proprietary product but InfoLease 9 had one of my favorites TUIs from a long gone era. You could navigate through and edit complicated contract information extremely quickly through a series of fixed number based menus and views. Once I got t…

Visual Basic for DOS is AWESOME. I briefly used it last year to make a Wordle clone for Dos. The 3D buttons in a TUI, event-based programming in DOS, the rich help system… just awesome.

An interface that UI designers of today should pay closer attention to. Same for Delphi in GUI land.

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

#237

Post by nilsherzig »

ryancooper4 wrote: post #235
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…

If one were to start a project from scratch today, with the goal of having such a hyper-efficient TUI, similar to the Lowes/Costco ones, to be accessible via SSH/Telnet/locally... are there frameworks out there to use? Would my best bet still be ncurses? Are there simpler alternatives?

There is bubbletea for go

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

#238

Post by falqun »

I am not that mutch of TUI interface user myself but I can recommend taking a look into ranger. Its a file manager with vi-like key binds that I enjoy because its for me a way faster way to explore in the terminal. It cuts the whole ls - cat - less - vim - cd workflow to a couple of keypresses and nice customizable previews in the terminal while browsing.

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

#239

Post by Grimblewald »

epolanski wrote: post #189
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…

> and boy are they fast with them My girlfriend works in a bank and she does virtually everything in a TUI. She hates it, but I've seen her using it and she's blazing fast and I can't, as a frontend developer, imagine how a full blown application would be better.

I've been transitioning many mobile apps I rely on to TUI-based alternatives or creating custom apps for personal purposes. Honestly, our obsession with eye candy has led us astray. Consider this: navigating old.reddit.com is significantly faster than browsing www.reddit.com. While there's a time and place for visually appealing designs, when it comes to conveying information efficiently, every non-informative element on the screen can hinder performance. I think we all intuitively know this - UI design is trending towards minimalism at the moment.

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

#240

Post by cosmos0072 »

pelcg wrote: post #8

The other day I found many TUI tools on a site called Terminal Trove: https://terminaltrove.com/ And it also features a great list of them here that many might not have heard of. https://terminaltrove.com/list/ For example trippy and nvtop look very nice for TUIs and other 'top' based tools they have listed there. https://terminaltrove.com/categories/top/ https://terminaltrove.com/trippy/ https://terminaltrove.com/nv…

In the same TUI spirit:

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

A text mode environment and window manager, with terminal emulation, VNC-style sessions and viewers, and networked clients.

Disclaimer: I'm the author

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