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

Post by 1718627440 » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 10:02 PM UTC

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #121

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 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.

Post by 1718627440 » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

andix wrote: post #67

conductr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in some cases. But largely, no, it really is not comparable. These TUI interfaces literally had 0 latency for any action. You could paste in text (from clipboard), with \t characters, and it would advance the input focus and could fill out an entire form with once paste action. There's a ton of real world cases where the browser is just too heavy to keep up with fast paced data entry. I've never once seen an ex…

It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA. Just get rid of all the fancy design, images, gradients, animations, and so on, and just focus on usability. The management needs to pick the right concept though, not the one with pretty and playful screenshots, but the one that focuses on the right KPIs (the 20 most common user flows need to take less than x seconds for an average user).

Post by 1718627440 » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 10:14 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #90

arichard123 wrote: post #14

I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You…

Devil's advocate: There is one thing GUIs do better than TUIs: international text. Try to present on the same terminal screen text in Arabic and Japanese.

Post by andix » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 10:29 PM UTC

1718627440 wrote: post #243

andix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA. Just get rid of all the fancy design, images, gradients, animations, and so on, and just focus on usability. The management needs to pick the right concept though, not the one with pretty and playful screenshots, but the one that focuses on the right KPIs (the 20 most common user flows need to take less than x seconds for an average user).

You can sure do that, but you are basically implementing a terminal in a website.

Post by anthk » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 10:43 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #90

arichard123 wrote: post #14

I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You…

Devil's advocate: There is one thing GUIs do better than TUIs: international text. Try to present on the same terminal screen text in Arabic and Japanese.