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

Post by FarmerPotato » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:55 PM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #214

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…

> 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 item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how fast you can physically push the buttons. Bloomberg Terminal basically. And then because of muscle memory, it's so hard for users to get used to another system. And then they…

Post by skydhash » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

rjmunro wrote: post #271

radley wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think Microsoft Office 2007 moving to a "ribbon" rather than normal menus and an optional toolbar for certain things was the major break in usability. Mac OS has kept the menus, and added a really useful menu search thing in "help", and this is huge. I think sublime text was one of the first to bring the TUI style super-powers into the modern desktop UK, where you press some random keyboard shortcut (e.g. cmd-p in…

Post by FarmerPotato » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

Post by FarmerPotato » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

conductr wrote: post #276

1313ed01 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not unique to TUIs, but also possible in GUIs where the developers care, and in some games (try the GUI ("tiles") version of Brogue). You can definitely make a GUI that updates in an instant and be fully keyboard-driven, even if that may have been more common last century.

We’re comparing TUI with web browsers for good reason. I don’t see any reason to add game engines to that debate. I have never seen a business client move any application from a TUI to a Unity based UI. I’ve never even heard of anyone considering a game engine in the architecture of a business application. So what you’re saying may well be true but it’s akin to a rare mythical creature, does it even exist?

Post by FarmerPotato » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

thwarted wrote: post #115

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…

Acquiring the skill to fly through such interfaces is equivalent to learning to play a musical instrument, where the desired attention (taking cues) and action (body/finger movement) becomes second nature. Such skill and interfaces are, unfortunately, not viewed as similarly valued as playing a musical instrument, and such visual presentation of the TUI is thought to be "difficult" to use, and they do take learning a…