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

Last few weekends I worked on a FPGA based Linux VT subset compatible tty display implementation for my HW projects.

Something that can be used to present some simple TUI on a largish LCD based on a simple 1-wire UART interface in a semi-standardized, performant and cheap way (good quality IPS displays are ~ 6-10 EUR, and tang nano is 10-20 EUR, depending on model).

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/tty-fpga.mp4

It also implements an efficient "scrolling" output mode, so it can simply be connected to anything that produces debug output on UART, too. Use cases are pretty flexible. Smallest Microchip PIC MCU can easily present a reasonably nice UI. :)

It can also accept input over the Tang Nano's USB UART directly from the connected PC (which is what's on the video).

At 3 Mbaud, it's possible to keep updating the content of whole screen at 50 FPS from a simple MCU, over a single wire at easily manageable interface frequencies. Anyhting less, like incremental changes to subset of screen content via ANSI escape sequences pretty much runs at 60FPS/display's refresh rate.

It's based on Tang Nano 9k currently, but it should fit even Tang Nano 1k, which is a bit cheaper.

quite a few great examples on this thread. I'll add lazygit (https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit) for doing git stuff, and fx (https://github.com/antonmedv/fx) for working with JSONs.

lazygit is excellent imo. every ui with keyboard shortcuts needs an action menu showing the keyboard shortcuts. You can execute commands from this menu, but it teaches you the keyboard shortcuts over time too. especially important for a tui, where it’s mostly/completely keyboard controls.

This one is more a layer 8 issue perhaps, but ideally there is some sort of guard rail that makes it so that if I accidentally start typing a message I think is going into slack, but I still have the tui focused, doesn’t execute a ton of very hard to reverse actions. Perhaps a good undo/redo stack is enough here, but some sort of vim like modality could work even better. It doesn’t happen often, but if it’s something like k9s the blast radius is… pretty big!

Yes, that's mentioned in the README.

I'm old enough to have used green screen CICS apps in a bank. The things that really helped productivity were:

* Information dense screens (despite having only 80x25 characters)

* Responsiveness

* Reliable type-ahead when the responsiveness wasn't quite good enough