Can you explain TUI? I have never heard this before

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.

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Muvasa 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		"It's not about saving time, it's about eliminating the mental toll from having to context switch" This broke my brain! Woah!

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criddell an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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GCUMstlyHarmls 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Eg: lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit?tab=readme-ov-file#... https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi 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.

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giglamesh 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So the acronym is for Terrible User Interface? ;)

	▲	worksonmine 38 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	allarm 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No it's not.

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ses1984 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Terminal UI.

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booleandilemma 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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

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KPGv2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it's the name gen Z and gen alpha puppyn00bs have given to what us old heads have always called CLIs

on tik too young folks are always discovering "revolutionary" things and giving them names, ignoring they're either super mundane, or already have a name

on one hand, i absolutely LOVE the passion for discovery and invention

on the other hand, if you're 19yo you probably didn't discover something revolutionary

(Edit: I've seen some people online suggest a CLI is only when you manually type the command yourself, while a TUI incorporates text-based graphical elements, but that's something invented by young people; everything before GUIs was called a CLI until pretty recently. A terminal is /literally/ a command-line interface.)

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TarqDirtyToMe 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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cristoperb 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know when the term became widespread for gui-style terminal programs, but the wikipedia entry has existed for more than 20 years so I think it is an older term than you imply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text-based_user_i...

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philiplu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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bombcar an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly. A CLI is a single line - like edlin. A TUI takes over all or most of the screen, like edit or vi or emacs.

Norton Commander (or Midnight Commander) is probably the quintessential example of a powerful TUI; it can do things that would be quite hard to replicate as easily in a CLI.

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KPGv2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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...

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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john_strinlai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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