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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISPF

Because the IBM mainframe world was late to the time-sharing party (ISPF was based on TSO, the Time-Sharing Option for System/360 and System/370, because the default mode for mainframes was batch processing from punched cards), and because IBM's 3270 terminal used screen-at-a-time updates instead of character-at-a-time, sending interrupts to the CPU only when Enter or a PF key was pressed, ISPF feels clunky and foreign compared to modern TUIs. But it really had a nice design, providing a vast improvement in UI to the mainframe in the form of a menu-driven interface, with a common API that application developers can use to take advantage of the same interface features as the system provides. There are even comprehensive help screens. Here's a demo of ISPF in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWVD2yM3tsY

This interface, or something like it, is what my mom used during her early days as a customer service rep for a large insurance company back in the 90s. You tab between fields, mash Enter to send the whole form, or hit an F key to take various actions. She became quick and efficient at entering or updating customer data. Then they switched to an all-new, all-shiny J2EE app with a browser front end, and she was completely at sixes and sevens. She may as well have turned into a large insect like Gregor Samsa, because the new UI made her less productive, she was punished for it, and she was not allowed to train with the new UI.

We think of mainframes as old and stodgy, but really what they were built to do they were great at: accepting and processing large amounts of business data and transactions. The workflow for that use case was incredibly streamlined, and modern software businesses could learn a lot from how the mainframe did things.

You can find reviews of hundreds of CLI And TUI programs, some great, others barely known and clearly forgotten. The last review is from 2015. Some reviews are very short, others are more involved.

The site is a blog with a tagline "Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux". The author K.Mandla is opinionated and has certain preferences for such programs like [1].

I have not looked at the site in years, but if you are willing to explore, this could be a fun option to find a variety of these tools.

[1]: https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/wpe-and-we-so...

The UI was refered to as COW character oriented windows. It would be good if it could be open sourced, for historical reference.

There were other interesting TUIs, the one in Defrag in DOS, and the Antivirus would change characters on the fly to generate a mouse cursor.

The TUI in DOSSHELL.exe would use customise some characters to draw icons.

Maybe Scott Hanselman could be persuaded to work on open sourcing all the COW apps.

(Honarable mention for EDIT in DOS7, which appears to be a rewrite, supporting long filenames).

In the modern era, there is YEdit from the author of YCmd, which implements a similar looking UI, in Windows http://www.malsmith.net/edit/

Some other TUIs of note included the ones in Wordperfect, Norton Utilities, and of course TurboVision (though the last has implementations in modern environments).

It mostly used single letter commands modelessly on the keyboard, if I recall, like 'd' to delete files, I think, probably with a confirmation like 'y/n' after you hit 'd'. It was written in ASM. I'm not 100% sure, I just remember how amazingly fast and frictionless it felt after getting used to it.

it was dual-pane. it was probably influenced by other commander/shells, like the Norton Commander, but when I got good with this, it was so fast. It was like using vim purely in edit (not insert) mode the friction of switching modes for managing your files. And you could use the mouse.