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I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick

I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You didn't have to hunt for the right place to look. You pressed the keys, which were buffered, looked to the appropriate part of the screen and more often than not the information you required appeared as you looked. Moving to a web based system meant we all had to use mice and spend our days moving them to the correct button on the page all the time. It added hours and hours to the processing. Bring back the TUI!

bdavisx 11mo ago
A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100% usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications take the time to do that design.
- bryanlarsen 11mo ago
  The other thing that a TUI generally does that a GUI doesn't is that it lets you type ahead, you can drive it without looking at the screen. Most GUI's make you wait for the form to appear before you can type into it. That totally destroys the flow of operators. There are GUI's that are properly designed to be keyboard driven and to allow type-ahead. Those can be truly best-of-both-worlds. Too bad they're so rare.
- conductr 11mo ago
  Maybe in some cases. But largely, no, it really is not comparable. These TUI interfaces literally had 0 latency for any action. You could paste in text (from clipboard), with \t characters, and it would advance the input focus and could fill out an entire form with once paste action. There's a ton of real world cases where the browser is just too heavy to keep up with fast paced data entry. I've never once seen an experienced user equal or gain efficiency when switching. It's always a loss even after months of acclimation.
  - andix 11mo ago
    It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA. Just get rid of all the fancy design, images, gradients, animations, and so on, and just focus on usability. The management needs to pick the right concept though, not the one with pretty and playful screenshots, but the one that focuses on the right KPIs (the 20 most common user flows need to take less than x seconds for an average user).
    - noir_lord 11mo ago
      Possible yes but there are properties of a TUI vs a GUI where the TUI encourages faster keyboard navigation because when they were common there was only keyboard navigation whereas a GUI comes with it's own upsides (discoverability been the big one). When I was in college (many years ago) the company I worked for used a TUI for its inventory/back office systems (terminal emulator talking to an AS/400) and once you understood the hierarchical structure and how it worked you could fly through that system because it was all keyboard nav. Few GUI's have ever been that fast for me even the ones that go out of their way to make everything accessible via the GUI bindable.
      - andix 11mo ago
        The real issue is, that modern UX design is often too focused on pretty looks, instead of productivity. It's still possible to make a highly productive UI look pretty, but the priority is often completely wrong. They shouldn't start from a few pretty figma sketches and then try to make them more usable. They should start from user flows, solve how the users can do certain things with maximum productivity, easy navigation, showing the right data together on the same screen, and so on. Only in the end make it pretty.
        hulitu 11mo ago
        > The real issue is, that modern UX design is often too focused on pretty looks, It may be pretty but it makes me puke. The "modern UX design" is based on layers upon layers of abstraction and "cheap" interfaces. Which one is the button ? Where is the scrollbar ?
- dartharva 11mo ago
  A large fraction of the entire point of a GUI is not being keyboard-centric.
  - FarmerPotato 11mo ago
    No, that's only the Steve Jobs view. You might be grappling with Discoverability. When IT was trying to sell everyone on WIMP GUI, the standard was WordPerfect. There, you had to memorize the functions of the F1-F12 keys, as well as their shifted (or Control) behavior. The only sure thing was that F1 was HELP. We were looking for something better--but having no keyboard was the opposite extreme.
- throw_a_grenade 11mo ago
  How do I implement type-ahead in Qt or GTK application?
  - GrinningFool 11mo ago
    Not specifically for those but I have to assume the pattern would work: you could intercept the keystrokes in a parent window or an overlay, then forward them to the correct child window once it's rendered.
    - 1718627440 11mo ago
      So you implement a rendering system and an input queue on top of a drawing region. Sounds like you are implementing a Terminal emulator.
conductr 11mo ago
I was making this argument in early 2000s, how the "upgrade" would kill efficiency - and it largely did for data entry. I did this swap in medical industry and finance industry and it landed on deaf ears all the time in the name of modernization. Actually, feels like I'm reliving it right now with AI.
andix 11mo ago
Sounds like the UX designers for the new applications didn't understand the requirements. I worked on two web app projects that required to be usable fast and with keyboards only. It's not that hard, if you define the requirements right. Also no scrolling was a requirement. This was done by defining a min and max screen resolution, and designing everything exactly for that. The app was supposed to be used exclusively full screen, so no need for responsive design. The result was a bit like a video game, very few loading delays and instant responses to user input.
HPsquared 11mo ago
TUIs have a high speed ceiling when muscle memory comes into play.
fluoridation 11mo ago
Devil's advocate: There is one thing GUIs do better than TUIs: international text. Try to present on the same terminal screen text in Arabic and Japanese.
- dardeaup 11mo ago
  Yes, I'm quite sure that's true in most cases. FWIW, dBASE IV version 1.5 does support Japanese for date format. It's one of the options for 'SET DATE' command.
  - fluoridation 11mo ago
    Isn't that just the order of the date components for I/O? It's still just ASCII characters.
    - dardeaup 11mo ago
      Yes! I was just pointing it out to show that they had at least thought of Japanese users (in some small way).
    - Rizz 11mo ago
      But the past didn't use ASCII as such, but extended character sets, or multiple characters sets, which did allow for Russian, German, etc. text interfaces.
      - FarmerPotato 11mo ago
        There is history frozen into printer manuals. One solution was control codes like DC1 to bank-switch the appearance of a block such as ASCII 128-159.
- wpm 11mo ago
  Actual terminal-based TUIs sure, they have small character sets burned into ROM, sized for 50-years-ago prices. Modern terminals, even the text-based console on a fresh minimal Arch linux install, is going to support Unicode probably without a ton of issues as long as you have a font installed that has the characters. The struggle then for RTL or non-Latin character sets and languages is making the UI fit the words in a way that makes sense.
thwarted 11mo ago
Acquiring the skill to fly through such interfaces is equivalent to learning to play a musical instrument, where the desired attention (taking cues) and action (body/finger movement) becomes second nature. Such skill and interfaces are, unfortunately, not viewed as similarly valued as playing a musical instrument, and such visual presentation of the TUI is thought to be "difficult" to use, and they do take learning and effort to achieve that level of mastery. Meanwhile, the interface to traditional musical instruments, while there's been some changes and improvements, have stood the test of time and remain attractive to a lot people who want to make music. Many of the claimed "improvements" that GUI interfaces have over TUIs look in some cases, to me, like busy box toys created for toddlers (this is how I feel about the Windows Ribbon menu widgets). Once something becomes second nature, it's not "I'm putting my fingers in this position" it is "I want to play an A after this series of other notes".
- FarmerPotato 11mo ago
  Brilliantly said.
BryanA 11mo ago
I experienced the same thing. The big Brokerage firm I worked for in the 90s had amazing TUIs. You could fly through the screens. They even had DMs and group chats. Pretty amazing. The next company I worked for was rolling-out a GUI replacement for their TUI interface and I watched people's productivity plummet as they went from keyboard, to mouse for every text box... Those old mainframe TUIs were amazing, probably the result of decades of time and motion studies.
- supportengineer 11mo ago
  Back then people probably got promoted for such things. Now they get promoted for changing things to appease MBAs and giving their boss something to talk about to their boss. America has fallen, and we can't get back up.
gadders 11mo ago
I remember seeing how past people were in 1-2-3 for DOS using the / menu back in the 90's.

bdavisx 11mo ago

A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100% usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications take the time to do that design.

bryanlarsen 11mo ago
The other thing that a TUI generally does that a GUI doesn't is that it lets you type ahead, you can drive it without looking at the screen. Most GUI's make you wait for the form to appear before you can type into it. That totally destroys the flow of operators. There are GUI's that are properly designed to be keyboard driven and to allow type-ahead. Those can be truly best-of-both-worlds. Too bad they're so rare.
conductr 11mo ago
Maybe in some cases. But largely, no, it really is not comparable. These TUI interfaces literally had 0 latency for any action. You could paste in text (from clipboard), with \t characters, and it would advance the input focus and could fill out an entire form with once paste action. There's a ton of real world cases where the browser is just too heavy to keep up with fast paced data entry. I've never once seen an experienced user equal or gain efficiency when switching. It's always a loss even after months of acclimation.
- andix 11mo ago
  It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA. Just get rid of all the fancy design, images, gradients, animations, and so on, and just focus on usability. The management needs to pick the right concept though, not the one with pretty and playful screenshots, but the one that focuses on the right KPIs (the 20 most common user flows need to take less than x seconds for an average user).
  - noir_lord 11mo ago
    Possible yes but there are properties of a TUI vs a GUI where the TUI encourages faster keyboard navigation because when they were common there was only keyboard navigation whereas a GUI comes with it's own upsides (discoverability been the big one). When I was in college (many years ago) the company I worked for used a TUI for its inventory/back office systems (terminal emulator talking to an AS/400) and once you understood the hierarchical structure and how it worked you could fly through that system because it was all keyboard nav. Few GUI's have ever been that fast for me even the ones that go out of their way to make everything accessible via the GUI bindable.
    - andix 11mo ago
      The real issue is, that modern UX design is often too focused on pretty looks, instead of productivity. It's still possible to make a highly productive UI look pretty, but the priority is often completely wrong. They shouldn't start from a few pretty figma sketches and then try to make them more usable. They should start from user flows, solve how the users can do certain things with maximum productivity, easy navigation, showing the right data together on the same screen, and so on. Only in the end make it pretty.
      - hulitu 11mo ago
        > The real issue is, that modern UX design is often too focused on pretty looks, It may be pretty but it makes me puke. The "modern UX design" is based on layers upon layers of abstraction and "cheap" interfaces. Which one is the button ? Where is the scrollbar ?
dartharva 11mo ago
A large fraction of the entire point of a GUI is not being keyboard-centric.
- FarmerPotato 11mo ago
  No, that's only the Steve Jobs view. You might be grappling with Discoverability. When IT was trying to sell everyone on WIMP GUI, the standard was WordPerfect. There, you had to memorize the functions of the F1-F12 keys, as well as their shifted (or Control) behavior. The only sure thing was that F1 was HELP. We were looking for something better--but having no keyboard was the opposite extreme.
throw_a_grenade 11mo ago
How do I implement type-ahead in Qt or GTK application?
- GrinningFool 11mo ago
  Not specifically for those but I have to assume the pattern would work: you could intercept the keystrokes in a parent window or an overlay, then forward them to the correct child window once it's rendered.
  - 1718627440 11mo ago
    So you implement a rendering system and an input queue on top of a drawing region. Sounds like you are implementing a Terminal emulator.

conductr 11mo ago

I was making this argument in early 2000s, how the "upgrade" would kill efficiency - and it largely did for data entry. I did this swap in medical industry and finance industry and it landed on deaf ears all the time in the name of modernization. Actually, feels like I'm reliving it right now with AI.

andix 11mo ago

Sounds like the UX designers for the new applications didn't understand the requirements. I worked on two web app projects that required to be usable fast and with keyboards only. It's not that hard, if you define the requirements right. Also no scrolling was a requirement. This was done by defining a min and max screen resolution, and designing everything exactly for that. The app was supposed to be used exclusively full screen, so no need for responsive design. The result was a bit like a video game, very few loading delays and instant responses to user input.

HPsquared 11mo ago

TUIs have a high speed ceiling when muscle memory comes into play.

fluoridation 11mo ago

Devil's advocate: There is one thing GUIs do better than TUIs: international text. Try to present on the same terminal screen text in Arabic and Japanese.

dardeaup 11mo ago
Yes, I'm quite sure that's true in most cases. FWIW, dBASE IV version 1.5 does support Japanese for date format. It's one of the options for 'SET DATE' command.
- fluoridation 11mo ago
  Isn't that just the order of the date components for I/O? It's still just ASCII characters.
  - dardeaup 11mo ago
    Yes! I was just pointing it out to show that they had at least thought of Japanese users (in some small way).
  - Rizz 11mo ago
    But the past didn't use ASCII as such, but extended character sets, or multiple characters sets, which did allow for Russian, German, etc. text interfaces.
    - FarmerPotato 11mo ago
      There is history frozen into printer manuals. One solution was control codes like DC1 to bank-switch the appearance of a block such as ASCII 128-159.
wpm 11mo ago
Actual terminal-based TUIs sure, they have small character sets burned into ROM, sized for 50-years-ago prices. Modern terminals, even the text-based console on a fresh minimal Arch linux install, is going to support Unicode probably without a ton of issues as long as you have a font installed that has the characters. The struggle then for RTL or non-Latin character sets and languages is making the UI fit the words in a way that makes sense.

thwarted 11mo ago

Acquiring the skill to fly through such interfaces is equivalent to learning to play a musical instrument, where the desired attention (taking cues) and action (body/finger movement) becomes second nature. Such skill and interfaces are, unfortunately, not viewed as similarly valued as playing a musical instrument, and such visual presentation of the TUI is thought to be "difficult" to use, and they do take learning and effort to achieve that level of mastery. Meanwhile, the interface to traditional musical instruments, while there's been some changes and improvements, have stood the test of time and remain attractive to a lot people who want to make music. Many of the claimed "improvements" that GUI interfaces have over TUIs look in some cases, to me, like busy box toys created for toddlers (this is how I feel about the Windows Ribbon menu widgets). Once something becomes second nature, it's not "I'm putting my fingers in this position" it is "I want to play an A after this series of other notes".

FarmerPotato 11mo ago
Brilliantly said.

BryanA 11mo ago

I experienced the same thing. The big Brokerage firm I worked for in the 90s had amazing TUIs. You could fly through the screens. They even had DMs and group chats. Pretty amazing. The next company I worked for was rolling-out a GUI replacement for their TUI interface and I watched people's productivity plummet as they went from keyboard, to mouse for every text box... Those old mainframe TUIs were amazing, probably the result of decades of time and motion studies.

supportengineer 11mo ago
Back then people probably got promoted for such things. Now they get promoted for changing things to appease MBAs and giving their boss something to talk about to their boss. America has fallen, and we can't get back up.

gadders 11mo ago

I remember seeing how past people were in 1-2-3 for DOS using the / menu back in the 90's.