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

Post by joemi » Wed, May 08, 2024, 7:23 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #205

joemi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish edit.com still existed for Windows and was built in. Every now and then I need to do some stuff on a Windows machine and find myself wishing for a simple terminal editor.

A Microsoft employee recently (~6 months) opened a Github issue to discuss a command line editor for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/discussions/16440 > " Thank you so much to everyone for engaging with this feature exploration! Your passion has generated a ton of excitement in our own team, and I’m happy to share our proposed direction, which is that we will work with Malcolm Smith (malxau), the maint…

Post by eviks » Wed, May 08, 2024, 8:22 PM UTC

oconnore wrote: post #133

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.

> Legacy apps never die I think it's a mistake to frame this as legacy vs. new. There are real benefits to the approach taken by these TUI applications and it would behoove modern app designers to learn from them. It's perhaps the case that those coffee shops will someday adopt a TUI once they reach a level of sophistication. As an example: I believe Starbucks uses a TUI for order processing.

Post by Dealt4973 » Wed, May 08, 2024, 8:31 PM UTC

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?

Post by viraptor » Wed, May 08, 2024, 9:10 PM UTC

electroly wrote: post #261

viraptor wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by markus_zhang » Thu, May 09, 2024, 12:18 AM UTC

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…