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…
That's because DOS (well, the IBM PC really) had a memory-mapped text mode display buffer instead of terminal emulation.
So much easier to fill a screen rapidly and do partial updates, scrolling, moving windows etc. when you can just do pointer arithmetic and memcpy.