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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?

#231

Post by titzer »

estimator7292 wrote: post #20

Many (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…

This times 1000x. I dream of an alternate path we could have taken where TUI and keyboard input was the default and all the fancy GUI stuff was put to good use where it's needed. In retrospect it's ludicrous that we have to use a pixel-perfect pointing device to amble slowly over to whereever the designers put their menus/toolbars/icons, context menus. Select from a list? I have like 50 keys that could do the job!

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

#232

Post by titzer »

thesuitonym wrote: post #97
estimator7292 wrote: post #20

Many (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…

> 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…

IMHO touchscreens just seem to keep falling into the same traps. Here's a big pile of unlabeled mysterious buttons with cryptic icons, at least one of which will probably ruin whatever you're doing without being able to go back. How do I know what it will do? Paw at it meekly and hope for the best!

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

#233

Post by titzer »

clickety_clack wrote: post #167
estimator7292 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the way. The "bicycle for your mind" that Jobs wanted. It augments your memory and enhances everything you do, and at every step you quickly internalize a system that doesn't change according to the whims of far-distant web devs.

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

#234

Post by 1718627440 »

radley wrote: post #181
estimator7292 wrote: post #20

Many (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…

> UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago. I'm going to push back a little on that. For several years, MacOS followed a strong UX convention with consistent keyboard shortcuts, menus, layout order, and more. Similarly, Microsoft started with the same, but with everything reversed. At the time, most major cross-platform apps followed these conventions. Two periods broke these rules: the expansion of web app…

What is one of the advantages of TUIs is that every action is deserialized from a common stream and that stream is buffered. This means both an advantage for speed, but also for a simplification for interaction, since if the user wants it, the information can flow in one direction only and the other direction happens only when the user wants it.

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

#235

Post by 1718627440 »

iso1631 wrote: post #207
estimator7292 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

GUIs used to have this too of course. Alt-F to bring up the file menu, the hotkey was underlined. That seems to have slowly vanished over the last 30 years

I still have this and I loath programs that breaks this consistency by shipping their own graphics toolkit stacks. This is a reason for me to deinstall a program and never use it again. Programs that are not 3D games or specialized CAD programs should only be allowed to use the OS graphics stack and nothing else. (This includes programs shipped by the OS vendor.)

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

#236

Post by ghthor »

dkenyser wrote: post #152

I immediately think of Terminal Coffee[1]. Been experimenting with charmbracelet's[2] stuff recently to do something similar. Still very early stages so nothing to show off yet but would highly recommend it for anyone else looking into creating a TUI app/business. [1] https://www.terminal.shop/ [2] https://github.com/charmbracelet

I’m bringing charmbracelet to the web using gotty. The example is chat app that uses tailscale as the auth layer, and is exposed over ssh via charmbracelet/wish and over http via gotty. I haven’t written any docs yet; you should be able to run the example chat app on your tail net.

Would like to add some other forms of auth, but tailscale was just so easy to provide the same auth for both ssh & http.

https://github.com/ghthor/webtea

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

#237

Post by 1718627440 »

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 once booted Windows 2003, it is crazy how you can intuitively interact with it via keyboard, without being familiar with that UI or ever having used a computer from even that era. It takes like ~40seconds to figure it out after trial and error.

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

#238

Post by 1718627440 »

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.

Yes, but the it's not due to slow rendering speed. GUIs render even slower.

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

#239

Post by 1718627440 »

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 do this to this day, over a crappy kilobyte line via Phone via Bluetooth and it works great.

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

#240

Post by 1718627440 »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #175
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about keyboard navigation rather than TUI vs GUI, there is no reason you have to render your app with plain text to support efficient keyboard nav.

It's also from an era where you used one piece of software doing routine tasks that rarely changed. Imagine learning all the keyboard shortcuts for every website you use nowadays. For example I worked at a video store long ago that had some dos program to manage everything, I didn't own a computer and I didn't use any other software. It was still often a slow turd, and it wasn't networked with the 2 other local store…

Imagine if all the websites would render to semantic html and the browser would provide the interface. The problem is not the concept of websites.
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