Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

81–90 of 299 posts

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

#81
Not what's commonly understood as TUI, but I love Acme from plan9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M

The entire UI is composed of text. You can place arbitrary commands anywhere on the screen. Interaction with other programs is natural and seamless. You're also not confined to the ANSI-terminal model. Perhaps most shockingly, Acme uses the mouse a lot.

I find that there's a lot of confusion between text-based, CLI, and ANSI sequences. That's unfortunate.

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

#82
Back in the days when most PC users lacked a mouse, people would make things to put over the F1-F12 keys (since those shortcuts tended to not be mnemonic) with what each key did with various modifiers. e.g. https://www.ebay.com/itm/276317392496

It was a neat way of surfacing lots of commands without taking up any screen-space.

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

#83
post #10
post #6

In stark contrast to most GNU/*nix tools, I really liked MS-DOS's edit.com text editor. Unlike emacs or vim or even nano, it didn't have a bunch of invisible shortcut keys, just a Windows-like drop-down menu system (but rendered in DOS). You could easily browse through the menu hierarchy, but still memorize certain shortcuts that you often use (just like Windows). In later versions you could even use the mouse to sel…

Not only that, I found it much easier to create TUIs on DOS than on a UN*X system. I still have a hard time with curses. Zortech c on DOS had a small set of screen functions, disp_*(). These are enhanced printf(), scanf(), getc() type functions by adding cursor positioning on an 80x25 screen. Pretty basic but you could create nice applications with these basic functions in Zortech c. Granted, on DOS the screen size d…

MS-DOS also supported the 80x43 or 80x50 screen modes for extra information density. On later hardware you would have SVGA-based or VESA-based text modes with even more density, though by that time DOS itself had mostly fallen out of use.

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

#84
post #6

In stark contrast to most GNU/*nix tools, I really liked MS-DOS's edit.com text editor. Unlike emacs or vim or even nano, it didn't have a bunch of invisible shortcut keys, just a Windows-like drop-down menu system (but rendered in DOS). You could easily browse through the menu hierarchy, but still memorize certain shortcuts that you often use (just like Windows). In later versions you could even use the mouse to sel…

> In stark contrast to most GNU/*nix tools

That's ridiculous! The only invisible things in Emacs deserve to be so. For everything else, there is a menu bar which is also visible in terminal `emacs -nw` mode. Just add `(xterm-mouse-mode t)` to ~/.emacs to make sure the mouse works properly. Very pointy, very clicky, and nice pretty menus that tell you the shortcut of each function.

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

#85
post #13
post #6

In stark contrast to most GNU/*nix tools, I really liked MS-DOS's edit.com text editor. Unlike emacs or vim or even nano, it didn't have a bunch of invisible shortcut keys, just a Windows-like drop-down menu system (but rendered in DOS). You could easily browse through the menu hierarchy, but still memorize certain shortcuts that you often use (just like Windows). In later versions you could even use the mouse to sel…

> Unlike emacs or vim or even nano, it didn't have a bunch of invisible shortcut keys, just a Windows-like drop-down menu system (but rendered in DOS). You might like "joe", which was inspired by WordStar: https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/ >

I'm still using joe on Linux (and macOS) 30 years later!

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

#90
I've built a TUI for terraform:

https://github.com/leg100/pug

It's built using Go and the bubbletea library. It's been a breath of fresh air compared to building a web app, simpler and faster to develop and test. And of course far more responsive than a web app could ever be.

Post reply on HN