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.

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andix 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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).

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conductr 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was just giving some examples, it being theoretically possible in SPA isn't really helpful given that nobody will implement it that way. You're basically living in theory.

I've literally done the before and after on this a handful of times and it's always worse off. Management will never do that, it's always design by committee, the KPIs won't be defined or will never really have teeth, it will turn into someone's vanity project, they won't even pay someone to optimize the code - quite the opposite, they'll choose to build it on something like Salesforce or some other very non-performant enterprise-y platform, etc, etc. All the TUI get these performance gains out of the box without much additional effort. The constraints of the UI are it's strength as it prevents people from adding all this bloat in the first place. When you leave it up to people, especially business users or UX folks, it will get spoiled. It's almost a law.

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andix 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> nobody will implement it that way

This is not true. Smart companies do it exactly that way. It saves them a lot of money.

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saulpw 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've never seen a smart company then.

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lo_zamoyski 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have a hard time believing this. The medium impacts interaction.

Do you have concrete examples in mind that we can review?

	▲	andix 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The things I've worked on were custom tools for internal use. Built on top of existing systems, to improve productivity for specific workflows.

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noir_lord 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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andix 18 hours ago | parent [-]

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 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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 ?

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hgamaral 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA.

Yeah, I guess I could say that before I tried rebinding ctrl-w and some of the Fx keys (like F12).

	▲	andix 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, in a browser you can't use all the shortcuts, but still a lot. If you really need it, just wrap it in Electron, Tauri, or any other customizable browser.

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1718627440 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can sure do that, but you are basically implementing a terminal in a website.

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andix 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Lol, no. You can still use different font sizes, traditional controls that can also be used with a mouse (for people who don't know the shortcuts yet). Also images are possible where they make sense.

While using very common web development stacks a lot of developers know how to deal with.

	▲	1718627440 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I give you different font sizes, but a mouse and images are available in the Terminal as well. I think the fancy new terminals also allow you to change the font.

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hulitu 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA.

Sending http response, waiting for reply. Http 200 ok

and so on and so forth. Web sucks. Of course, you can have something like Jira, bur still sucks.

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maccard 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My experience has always been that TUIs and Terminal emulators these days have massive snags with how they handle control codes and inputs. Pasting into a terminal is a crapshoot of “what on earth is it going to spew back at me”.

It’s perfectly possible to handle large amounts of data by copy and paste on a web browser, you just have to actually support it.

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1313ed01 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is not unique to TUIs, but also possible in GUIs where the developers care, and in some games (try the GUI ("tiles") version of Brogue). You can definitely make a GUI that updates in an instant and be fully keyboard-driven, even if that may have been more common last century.