4 ms·

Can you explain TUI? I have never heard this before

by firesteelrain 8mo ago

ses1984 8mo ago
Terminal UI.
- CRConrad 8mo ago
  Textual / Text-based UI used to be more common. Makes more sense, too: Although you run TUI apps in it, the terminal itself is inherently more of a CLI than a TUI. Makes "terminal" rather misleading, IMO.
Bjartr 8mo ago
Terminal User Interface, contrasting with a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Most often applied to programs that use the terminal as a pseudo-graphical canvas that they draw on with characters to provide an interactive page that can be navigated around with the keyboard. Really, they're just a GUI drawn with Unicode instead of drawing primitives. Like many restrictions, limiting oneself to just a fixed grid of colored Unicode characters for drawing lends itself to more creative solutions to problems. Some people prefer such UIs, some people don't.
- Muvasa 8mo ago
  I prefer tui's for two reasons. 1. Very used to vi keybindings 2. I like low resources software. I love the ability to open the software in less than a second in a second do what I needed using vi motions. And close it less than a second. Some people will be like you save two seconds trying to do something simple. You lose more time building the tool than you will use it in your life. It's not about saving time. It's about eliminating the mental toll from having to context switch(i know it sounds ai, reading so much ai text has gotten to me)
  - irl_zebra 8mo ago
    "It's not about saving time, it's about eliminating the mental toll from having to context switch" This broke my brain! Woah!
  - kstrauser 8mo ago
    That’s an excellent way to explain it. I’m already in the shell doing stuff. Whenever I can stay there without sacrificing usability, it’s a big boost.
  - 1718627440 8mo ago
    Yet another benefit is that it is buffered, so you don't need to wait for the program to catch up, before you can type the next key.
- criddell 8mo ago
  > an interactive page that can be navigated around with the keyboard Or mouse / trackpad. I really haven't seen anything better for making TUIs than Borland's Turbo Vision framework from 35ish years ago.
GCUMstlyHarmls 8mo ago
Eg: lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit?tab=readme-ov-file#features https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit?tab=readme-ov-file#... https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi https://github.com/darrenburns/posting https://github.com/darrenburns/posting or I guess Vim would be a prominent example. Peoples definitions will be on a gradient, but its somewhere between CLI (type into a terminal to use) and GUI (use your mouse in a windowing system), TUI runs in your terminal like a CLI but probably supports "graphical widgets" like buttons, bars, hotkeys, panes, etc.
- giglamesh 8mo ago
  So the acronym is for Terrible User Interface? ;)
  - allarm 8mo ago
    No it's not.
  - worksonmine 8mo ago
    TUI is peak UI, anyone who disagrees just don't get it. Every program listens to the same keybindings, looks the same and are composable to work together. You don't get that clicking buttons with the mouse. It's built to get the work done not look pretty.
KPGv2 8mo ago
[flagged]
- TarqDirtyToMe 8mo ago
  They aren’t the same thing. TUI refers to interactive ncurses-like interfaces. Vim has a TUI, ls does not I’m fairly certain this terminology has been around since at least the early aughts.
- philiplu 8mo ago
  Sorry, but this 65 yo grey-beard disagrees. A TUI to me, back in the 80s/90s, was something that ran in the terminal and was almost always ncurses-based. This was back when I was still using ADM-3A serial terminals, none of that new-fangled PCs stuff.
  - KPGv2 8mo ago
    We might've been caught on different parts of the wave. I checked Ngrams out of curiosity https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TUI&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TUI&year_start... Basically it was never used, then it was heavily used, and then never used, and then in the early 00s it took off again. That'd explain why you used it, I never did, and now young kids are.
    - marssaxman 8mo ago
      Thanks for looking that up! It makes sense, of course - the line starts to drop in 1984, with the release of the Macintosh, and hits a trough around the launch of Windows 95. It's not a term I recall hearing at all when I started using computers in the mid-'80s - all that mattered back then was "shiny new GUI, or the clunky old thing?" I really thought it was a retroneologism when I first heard it, maybe twenty years ago.
    - rjmunro 8mo ago
      I don't think that search is very valid - the TUI group travel companies are likely much more mentioned than Terminal User Interface. They are pretty big around the world and have an airline, cruises, hotels etc.
booleandilemma 8mo ago
It's definitely an acronym that got popular in the last year or so, though I'm sure there are people out there who will pretend otherwise. I've been in the industry 15+ years now and never heard it before. Previously it was just UI, GUI, or CLI.
- freedomben 8mo ago
  It's gotten more popular for sure, but it's definitely been around a long time. Even just on HN there have been conversation about gdb tui ever since I've been here (starting browsing HN around 2011). For anyone who works in embedded systems it's a very common term and has been since I got into it in 2008-ish. I would guess it was much more of a linux/unix user thing until recently though, so people on windows and mac probably rarely if ever intersected with the term, so that's definitely a change. Just my observations.
- snozolli 8mo ago
  As someone who came up using Borland's Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Turbo Vision (their OOP UI framework), it was called CUI (character-based user interface) to distinguish from GUI, which became relevant as Windows became dominant. I never heard "TUI" until the last few years, but it may be due to my background being Microsoft-oriented. One of the only references I can find is the PC Magazine encyclopedia: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/cui https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/cui
- 0x1ch 8mo ago
  My friends and I have been actively in the "CLI/TUI" since middle school. Anyone tinkering on linux that used tiling window managers is already very familiar with the domain.
- purerandomness 8mo ago
  It's been around as long as TUI tools have been around (Midnight Commander, etc) Here's a blog post from 2014 [1] mentioning it. Sometimes, we're the one in today's 10000, sometimes it's someone else [2] [1] https://khanifnasrudin.blogspot.com/2014/11/text-based-user-interface.html https://khanifnasrudin.blogspot.com/2014/11/text-based-user-... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
layer8 8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface

Can you explain TUI? I have never heard this before

ses1984 8mo ago

Terminal UI.

CRConrad 8mo ago
Textual / Text-based UI used to be more common. Makes more sense, too: Although you run TUI apps in it, the terminal itself is inherently more of a CLI than a TUI. Makes "terminal" rather misleading, IMO.

Bjartr 8mo ago

Terminal User Interface, contrasting with a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Most often applied to programs that use the terminal as a pseudo-graphical canvas that they draw on with characters to provide an interactive page that can be navigated around with the keyboard. Really, they're just a GUI drawn with Unicode instead of drawing primitives. Like many restrictions, limiting oneself to just a fixed grid of colored Unicode characters for drawing lends itself to more creative solutions to problems. Some people prefer such UIs, some people don't.

Muvasa 8mo ago
I prefer tui's for two reasons. 1. Very used to vi keybindings 2. I like low resources software. I love the ability to open the software in less than a second in a second do what I needed using vi motions. And close it less than a second. Some people will be like you save two seconds trying to do something simple. You lose more time building the tool than you will use it in your life. It's not about saving time. It's about eliminating the mental toll from having to context switch(i know it sounds ai, reading so much ai text has gotten to me)
- irl_zebra 8mo ago
  "It's not about saving time, it's about eliminating the mental toll from having to context switch" This broke my brain! Woah!
- kstrauser 8mo ago
  That’s an excellent way to explain it. I’m already in the shell doing stuff. Whenever I can stay there without sacrificing usability, it’s a big boost.
- 1718627440 8mo ago
  Yet another benefit is that it is buffered, so you don't need to wait for the program to catch up, before you can type the next key.
criddell 8mo ago
> an interactive page that can be navigated around with the keyboard Or mouse / trackpad. I really haven't seen anything better for making TUIs than Borland's Turbo Vision framework from 35ish years ago.

GCUMstlyHarmls 8mo ago

Eg: lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit?tab=readme-ov-file#features https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit?tab=readme-ov-file#... https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi https://github.com/darrenburns/posting https://github.com/darrenburns/posting or I guess Vim would be a prominent example. Peoples definitions will be on a gradient, but its somewhere between CLI (type into a terminal to use) and GUI (use your mouse in a windowing system), TUI runs in your terminal like a CLI but probably supports "graphical widgets" like buttons, bars, hotkeys, panes, etc.

giglamesh 8mo ago
So the acronym is for Terrible User Interface? ;)
- allarm 8mo ago
  No it's not.
- worksonmine 8mo ago
  TUI is peak UI, anyone who disagrees just don't get it. Every program listens to the same keybindings, looks the same and are composable to work together. You don't get that clicking buttons with the mouse. It's built to get the work done not look pretty.

KPGv2 8mo ago

[flagged]

TarqDirtyToMe 8mo ago
They aren’t the same thing. TUI refers to interactive ncurses-like interfaces. Vim has a TUI, ls does not I’m fairly certain this terminology has been around since at least the early aughts.
philiplu 8mo ago
Sorry, but this 65 yo grey-beard disagrees. A TUI to me, back in the 80s/90s, was something that ran in the terminal and was almost always ncurses-based. This was back when I was still using ADM-3A serial terminals, none of that new-fangled PCs stuff.
- KPGv2 8mo ago
  We might've been caught on different parts of the wave. I checked Ngrams out of curiosity https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TUI&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TUI&year_start... Basically it was never used, then it was heavily used, and then never used, and then in the early 00s it took off again. That'd explain why you used it, I never did, and now young kids are.
  - marssaxman 8mo ago
    Thanks for looking that up! It makes sense, of course - the line starts to drop in 1984, with the release of the Macintosh, and hits a trough around the launch of Windows 95. It's not a term I recall hearing at all when I started using computers in the mid-'80s - all that mattered back then was "shiny new GUI, or the clunky old thing?" I really thought it was a retroneologism when I first heard it, maybe twenty years ago.
  - rjmunro 8mo ago
    I don't think that search is very valid - the TUI group travel companies are likely much more mentioned than Terminal User Interface. They are pretty big around the world and have an airline, cruises, hotels etc.

booleandilemma 8mo ago

It's definitely an acronym that got popular in the last year or so, though I'm sure there are people out there who will pretend otherwise. I've been in the industry 15+ years now and never heard it before. Previously it was just UI, GUI, or CLI.

freedomben 8mo ago
It's gotten more popular for sure, but it's definitely been around a long time. Even just on HN there have been conversation about gdb tui ever since I've been here (starting browsing HN around 2011). For anyone who works in embedded systems it's a very common term and has been since I got into it in 2008-ish. I would guess it was much more of a linux/unix user thing until recently though, so people on windows and mac probably rarely if ever intersected with the term, so that's definitely a change. Just my observations.
snozolli 8mo ago
As someone who came up using Borland's Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Turbo Vision (their OOP UI framework), it was called CUI (character-based user interface) to distinguish from GUI, which became relevant as Windows became dominant. I never heard "TUI" until the last few years, but it may be due to my background being Microsoft-oriented. One of the only references I can find is the PC Magazine encyclopedia: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/cui https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/cui
0x1ch 8mo ago
My friends and I have been actively in the "CLI/TUI" since middle school. Anyone tinkering on linux that used tiling window managers is already very familiar with the domain.
purerandomness 8mo ago
It's been around as long as TUI tools have been around (Midnight Commander, etc) Here's a blog post from 2014 [1] mentioning it. Sometimes, we're the one in today's 10000, sometimes it's someone else [2] [1] https://khanifnasrudin.blogspot.com/2014/11/text-based-user-interface.html https://khanifnasrudin.blogspot.com/2014/11/text-based-user-... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

layer8 8mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface