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.)

▲

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.

▲

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...

▲

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.

▲

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.

▲

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.

▲

john_strinlai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]