Post #3398033

2026-06-23 02:26 UTC

@rl_dane@polymaths.social I've been doing a bit of thinking out loud (very loudly), of late, about TUIs. Half-jokingly, I have said, the modern user is so habituated to the text-based interaction with the computer, thanks to the almighty LLM, that it is high time for us oldies to sneak in the traditional TUIs into this generation of users's desktops. The non-joking half is this. Modern TUIs have got so sophisticated that they now have their own unique aesthetics. Yet, they can be programmed in the same way that were done with the 1970s and 1980s TUIs. No remote calls, no async/await, etc. Some of them even have web browser integration. Most line-of-business web apps today are used by a handful of in-house business experts only; there is absolutely no need for them to use React, Angular, and other massive web GUI frameworks. The only reason these web apps came into existence is the in-house coders wanted to get those frameworks on their resumes, so they can go work at the Big Tech. @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @synlogic4242@social.vivaldi.net

Replies (1)

@rl_dane@polymaths.social 2026-06-23 02:39

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @synlogic4242@social.vivaldi.net I'm impressed with what creatives can do with web apps, but when I have to use them for work, I cringe. Like, a JS-heavy thing for creating music or procedural art? GRAVY A JS-heavy thing for me to check my bank account? "Calgon, take me awaaayayyy..." 😂 I remember using TUI-and TUI-like GUIs (very, very text-heavy GUI database applications where there really wasn't enough room on a 640x480 or even 800x600 screen to waste space on much of anything but TEXT) in the 90s, and they were so efficient. To this day, I'm still running a nearly decade-old version of an accounting application at work, because I just will NOT muck with the horrid web apps. If you see me using this old desktop program (via VNC, 'cause boyo ain't running windows on his own machine!! 😆), I'm absolutely flying through screens and menus; I have every major screen memorized and know exactly how many times to hit TAB to move from the addressee to the date field, to amount, category, memo, class, then enter, enter and on to the next thing. If I had to use a web application for that, you'd have to put me on suicide watch. 😂 But I've actually been learning and using ed recently. For all its limitations, there s a very Zen feeling when editing text in ed, which isn't even a TUI. It is (as I'm sure all here know) an editor that would work on a terminal as dumb as the Apple I. My only complaint with TUIs is that they lack the shared keybinds and consistency of early GUIs. Some are very vi-like or even less-like, but others are more bespoke. Going from vi to less is easy, then less to a web browser like lynx, w3m, or cha. But links/links2? Totally different keybinds, and not configurable. urgh. Some kind of committee thing to come up with interaction standards for TUIs would be golden. Some are very intuitive, like the fedi client I use, @tut@fosstodon.org. Others require a bit more learning to get comfortable with, like iamb, the Matrix client. I often think back to the Apple Macintosh project, and Jef Raskin, who wanted to make it a text-based, and keyboard-driven system. I would have liked to see what his ideas were like, because I think it would've been a neat midpoint between the user-friendliness of modern-ish GUIs, and the sheer power of a nicely-designed interactive Unix program (TUI and not-quite-TUI).

Open ##3398032