Comment by arichard123
7 hours ago
I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You didn't have to hunt for the right place to look. You pressed the keys, which were buffered, looked to the appropriate part of the screen and more often than not the information you required appeared as you looked.
Moving to a web based system meant we all had to use mice and spend our days moving them to the correct button on the page all the time. It added hours and hours to the processing.
Bring back the TUI!
A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100% usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications take the time to do that design.
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.
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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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.
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.
The other thing that a TUI generally does that a GUI doesn't is that it lets you type ahead, you can drive it without looking at the screen.
Most GUI's make you wait for the form to appear before you can type into it. That totally destroys the flow of operators.
There are GUI's that are properly designed to be keyboard driven and to allow type-ahead. Those can be truly best-of-both-worlds. Too bad they're so rare.
A large fraction of the entire point of a GUI is not being keyboard-centric.
How do I implement type-ahead in Qt or GTK application?
Not specifically for those but I have to assume the pattern would work: you could intercept the keystrokes in a parent window or an overlay, then forward them to the correct child window once it's rendered.
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I was making this argument in early 2000s, how the "upgrade" would kill efficiency - and it largely did for data entry. I did this swap in medical industry and finance industry and it landed on deaf ears all the time in the name of modernization. Actually, feels like I'm reliving it right now with AI.
Sounds like the UX designers for the new applications didn't understand the requirements. I worked on two web app projects that required to be usable fast and with keyboards only. It's not that hard, if you define the requirements right.
Also no scrolling was a requirement. This was done by defining a min and max screen resolution, and designing everything exactly for that. The app was supposed to be used exclusively full screen, so no need for responsive design.
The result was a bit like a video game, very few loading delays and instant responses to user input.
Acquiring the skill to fly through such interfaces is equivalent to learning to play a musical instrument, where the desired attention (taking cues) and action (body/finger movement) becomes second nature. Such skill and interfaces are, unfortunately, not viewed as similarly valued as playing a musical instrument, and such visual presentation of the TUI is thought to be "difficult" to use, and they do take learning and effort to achieve that level of mastery. Meanwhile, the interface to traditional musical instruments, while there's been some changes and improvements, have stood the test of time and remain attractive to a lot people who want to make music. Many of the claimed "improvements" that GUI interfaces have over TUIs look in some cases, to me, like busy box toys created for toddlers (this is how I feel about the Windows Ribbon menu widgets). Once something becomes second nature, it's not "I'm putting my fingers in this position" it is "I want to play an A after this series of other notes".
Devil's advocate: There is one thing GUIs do better than TUIs: international text. Try to present on the same terminal screen text in Arabic and Japanese.
Just use gettext? The strings might vary in sizes, but when you are comfortable with the text resolution of the GUI, just set your Terminal to the same resolution and that problem is the same.
Actual terminal-based TUIs sure, they have small character sets burned into ROM, sized for 50-years-ago prices.
Modern terminals, even the text-based console on a fresh minimal Arch linux install, is going to support Unicode probably without a ton of issues as long as you have a font installed that has the characters. The struggle then for RTL or non-Latin character sets and languages is making the UI fit the words in a way that makes sense.
Yes, you can spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to lay out multilingual text on a terminal, or just use Cairo or some toolkit and let solved problems stay solved.
Not an issue with modern terminals and Unifont.
Yes, I'm quite sure that's true in most cases.
FWIW, dBASE IV version 1.5 does support Japanese for date format. It's one of the options for 'SET DATE' command.
Isn't that just the order of the date components for I/O? It's still just ASCII characters.
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I experienced the same thing. The big Brokerage firm I worked for in the 90s had amazing TUIs. You could fly through the screens. They even had DMs and group chats. Pretty amazing. The next company I worked for was rolling-out a GUI replacement for their TUI interface and I watched people's productivity plummet as they went from keyboard, to mouse for every text box... Those old mainframe TUIs were amazing, probably the result of decades of time and motion studies.
Back then people probably got promoted for such things.
Now they get promoted for changing things to appease MBAs and giving their boss something to talk about to their boss.
America has fallen, and we can't get back up.
TUIs have a high speed ceiling when muscle memory comes into play.