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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?

#291

Post by eviks »

semi wrote: post #289
eviks wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are no benefits, you can replicate everything in terms of user interaction identically in a more readable/better looking GUI app, so efficiency is maintained

why would a gui app be more readable for reading text? The only inate difference I can think of is the ability to vary fonts and rendering based on what you are rendering more. And that can be a nice improvement to e. g show your code at a normal size but pop a tooltip up with smaller text, or have the linter/errors tab be a smaller font. But that's a difference and not necessarily an improvement, because having a co…

Don't get it, is linter in smaller font an improvement or not (as it's somehow slower)?

> fixed width text can make things more predictable and faster to interact with as you don't have to scan around as much.

In what way does "i" not looking as wide as "w" force any scan speed deterioration?

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

#292

Post by jhayward »

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?

The `rich` module for Python is remarkably complete and lets you code at a very high level - even has CSS. Rich's sibling, Textual[1] is designed for building TUIs.

[1] https://github.com/Textualize/textual

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

#293

Post by rev4324rev4324 »

p_l wrote: post #267
al_borland wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder what they'll do when they will have to switch to ARM-based macs without BootCamp support. Also, do you mean Apple resellers that market themselves as actual Apple Stores? I don't think there is an actual Apple store in Poland yet

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

#294

Post by IIsi50MHz »

kjs3 wrote: post #172
cpach wrote: post #7

WordPerfect is an interesting example: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/wordperfect.html WordStar is another one, used by George RR Martin et al: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/words...

I used the TUI WordPerfect for SCO Unix/Xenix on various serial terminals and telnet/ssh connections for years. I still miss it for heads-down cranking out text.

Ah, yes. "WordPerfect 1.0 for UNIX" was the primary use of my upper school's 45 orange-plasma Wyse dumb-terminals! Not too shabby.

Sometimes a terminal would desync while you were typing up a storm, spewing control codes onto the screen. Many re-re-learned the need for frequent saves.

The WordPerfect spellchecker's short list of suggestions was typical of word processors, even decades later. A few of us knew to press the magic key to drop into a shell and use the mini's speller, which appeared to dump the whole wordlist, instantly sorted by similarity, one screen at a time. We could usually hop back into WordPerfect before anyone in charge asked why we weren't either at the system login screen or using WP. I never found another speller that worked like that.

They never did get the upgrade cards for those terminals, to turn them into smart-terminals. PC 386s with Win3.11 were the next big investment.

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

#296

Post by brokenmachine »

electroly wrote: post #221
graemep wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mice are the problem, not the rest of the GUI. Keyboards are just faster once you learn them.

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…

>Competent users could be several screens ahead of the computer

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

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

#297

Post by duckmysick »

mr_mitm wrote: post #116
duckmysick wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not using Confluence anymore, but I imagine others would find your TUI useful. Have you considered publishing it?

I have, and I did: https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/Congruence I consider it MeWare: written for me, but published for others to use because why not? But don't expect a polished product.

Thanks, that's awesome. Love the MeWare term, I'm going to add it to my vocabulary.

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

#299

Post by p_l »

rev4324rev4324 wrote: post #293
p_l wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder what they'll do when they will have to switch to ARM-based macs without BootCamp support. Also, do you mean Apple resellers that market themselves as actual Apple Stores? I don't think there is an actual Apple store in Poland yet

There's a "blessed" reseller that runs "closest thing to Apple Store", and that's running under the brand "iStore"
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