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

It's unix command names for fast food!

chown MCNUGS, please!

Oxide computer has a really interesting one. This probably hits all of the big points: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1272104

When FoxPro made the transition to being graphical with Visual FoxPro, I'm pretty sure it took xbase programs that worked on consoles and made them work as a graphical application. Stuff like '@ 10, 10 SAY "First name:" that was originally written to display the string "First name:" on the 11th row (first one starts at 0) and 11th column of the terminal would now be translated into proportional pixel units graphically.

They don't usually count as TUIs, but there are some great CLI programs, even for interactive use. Perhaps the classic example beyond the usual is the MH mail handling system, which is still maintained as nmh [0]. Instead of a single monolith like thunderbird, mutt, or mailx, it consists of multiple commands that list mails, show them, let you compose new ones, etc, and keeps all intermediate state on the filesystem which makes it very easy to back up or do anything with using the usual file management commands. Mblaze [1] is a more modern implementation of a similar concept that uses amildirs, and it's how I interact with my emails these days.

There are also programs that function more similar to "monoliths" but still act like a shell or repl as far as accepting commands and executing them. Clifm [2] is one example, it's the only file manager I seriously tried using before giving up and returning to ls and friends. If you have vi or any of its discendents odds are you can run them in "ex" mode where you use them similar to the good old ed. Speaking of ed, edbrowse [3] is a browser with an ed-like interface that can also read mail (and no I'm not making it up. An interesting thing about it (well, at least one of them) is that one can define "functions" which are pretty similar to functions in sh. For example, this is a function to search something on searx:

``` function+gg { db0 b https://searx.be/ // i=~0 db1 /start search/i i2* /h1/ } ```

While this can certainly be done in a conventional browser using userscripts or such, I'd argue that this sort of function is easier to write because most of it is something you were doing already, and now you're just putting it in a shorthand, where in a userscript you'd probably have to use a lot of getElementById()s to do it, which besides being more verbose is very different to how you think about the problem.

[0]: https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/ [1]: https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze [2]: https://leo-arch.github.io/clifm/ [3]: https://edbrowse.org/

I can't remember all of them, but the abbreviations sort of became a running joke amongst me and my coworkers; specifically we would use them for nicknames of managers we didn't like.

None of them were vulgar or anything, but for example we had taken to calling one of the managers "McNugs" because he stole a bunch of chicken nuggets (like literally a whole box, not just one or two from the line), tried to claim that the workers did it, and we actually needed to get the security footage to exonerate us, and surprisingly he wasn't fired for it. We all started calling him McNugs, which he absolutely hated, but I think he was afraid to do anything about it because he was already on thin ice for trying to frame us.

I might have them written down somewhere, I'll have to look.