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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?

#261

Post by electroly »

viraptor wrote: post #251
electroly wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's part of it but not all of it. Today's modern UIs won't buffer keystrokes as you move between UI contexts. You often have to wait for a bit of UI to load/appear before you can continue, or else your premature keystroke will be eaten or apply to the wrong window. This kills your throughput because you have to look at the screen and wait to recognize something happening. Even if you have all the keystrokes memorize…

This works if you have one app with a completely dedicated computer. But that's a limitation on the popular systems. If you have an automatic focus switch to new windows, like Windows/Mac pretty much enforces, you can't buffer input. An incoming call to your VoIP system would be dropped/redirected, because you were typing the right thing at the time.

No, Windows goes out of its way not to allow a popup window from a background application to take focus. Instead, it blinks the taskbar icon. An incoming call should not start eating the keystrokes you were sending to the active application. Focus stealing isn't totally solved as an issue, but it's certainly regarded as a problem to be solved and not the desired behavior.

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

#262

Post by opan »

Most people probably already know ranger and vim. If you like those, stig is a fantastic frontend for the Transmission bittorrent client. Has both tui and cli. I mostly use the tui, but sometimes cli is useful for e.g. `sleep 15m && stig start stopped`.

The tui controls are quite intuitive if you know vim, and a lot of them are basically abbreviations, like ts for torrent start/stop, tm for torrent move (setting path), tn for torrent name (rename top level dir/file of the torrent), td for torrent delete. The command mode in the tui is also quite flexible. You use :add to add a torrent by url or file path, and you can specify -s to add in stopped state and -p to specify the path for all those torrents, but those args can go before or after the torrents. Depending if I have the path or torrent on my clipboard first I'll write out the command differently. Often I use primary selection to grab a torrent url from my IRC client and then my clipboard manager of sorts to slap a path on my clipboard and paste both in quick succession.

I keep it running in tmux on my server and can add torrents from my phone or PC over ssh. It can connect to remote Transmission sessions, but my distro doesn't package it so I just run it on the same server as Transmission. In the past I used other frontends for Transmission and Deluge, but none are nearly as good as stig.

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

#263

Post by kotaKat »

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…

Yep. Many long-time Lowes employees will remember specific GENESIS screens to drop into by their numeric shortcuts and whip through the system.

While they've modernized a front-end to GENESIS (see their current POS deployment), there's still an option to dump the system back into a TUI for advanced features (the Alt+F12 option).

https://i.redd.it/to1k7tbsq9b51.jpg

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

#264

Post by thworp »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #20

These certainly aren't forgotten, but I like: * `ranger` file manager: https://ranger.github.io/ * `ncdu` for visualising disk usage: https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu * `htop` process monitor: https://htop.dev/ I just find them very intuitive, and information-dense while not being overwhelming.

A very good alternative to ranger is lf https://github.com/gokcehan/lf

It's a lot faster in all aspects, has mostly the same features and is pretty much a standalone binary.

edit: an even more minimal alteranative is nnn https://github.com/jarun/nnn

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

#265

Post by noirscape »

justin_oaks wrote: post #47
layer8 wrote: post #33

Not particularly high-level, but representing common TUI designs and usage patterns on Unix: Slrn, Mutt, Ncdu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slrn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncdu

For those who are familiar with using the *nix du command, ncdu is like a nice step up. Finding what is using your disk space naturally requires repeatedly descending into directories and checking what is using up most space. So having TUI for it makes a lot of sense. Thanks for listing it.

ncdu also has the really cool feature of being able to dump its internal scan state to stdout and having a flag to load that state, which means you can pipe SSH output from ncdu on a server into a local file. Then you can inspect what's taking up space on a VPS without having to log in on it.

It's especially great if the server is out of disk space and/or the server is under too heavy a load to keep an SSH connection going; you can investigate what's clogging up space (usually logfiles gone awry) and clean up accordingly.

It's one of the default utilities I have installed on my servers for a very good reason and it's helped out countless times over the past few years for hobby servers of mine (aka the ones where "scaling it up" isn't an option because the budget is constrained by it being a hobby).

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

#267

Post by p_l »

al_borland wrote: post #197
neelc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen those at Costco stores also. Whereas in indie coffee shops they use a Square tablet and in Apple stores the store people just use iPhones with special cases. Best Buy or Walgreens uses POS tablets with a relatively ugly GUI. Legacy apps never die. Charles Schwab might use mainframes while Robinhood won't but Schwab won't move off because it's too hard for an established firm. Same with Costco TUIs.

Before Apple switched to the iPhone for their POS system they used iMacs with a very ugly app. I think it was called iPOS. I know as a customer I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I was surprised Apple used something like that, considering Jobs always talking about how even the inside of something that no one ever sees should still be beautiful.

My favourite is how what most people think of "apple store" in Poland the Macs that run sales will actually run windows with BootCamp and run some run of the mill POS/ERP software.

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

#268

Post by rakoo »

leephillips wrote: post #102
rakoo wrote: post #72

Shameless plug: I built my own MUA with ~300 lines of shell glue and the fantastic mblaze for mail handling and fzf for navigating, displaying and doing custom actions. Thanks to fzf I can declare shortcuts that will do whatever I need to do with the given email (reply, filter with the same subject, open attachments, whatever it is I need) Don't look too closely at the specific code, it is all custom to my own use an…

Sounds interesting. Where is it?

Oops sorry I forgot it: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/

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

#269

Post by wonger_ »

davekeck wrote: post #37

I don't know if it "deserves to be known" but I made debase to make git editing easier: https://toaster.llc/debase

I love this. Perhaps consider updating the GitHub repo with links, gifs, tags, and a README. It might get some more exposure.

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

#270

Post by withinboredom »

epolanski wrote: post #253
rossant wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's ugly to look at and took her a long time to learn. Copy pasting is also troublesome, and that one is a common scenario to copy/paste from emails.

Cyril-shift-v doesn’t work? Or is it some weird terminal app like the old Microsoft one?
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