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Comment by KPGv2

6 days ago

[flagged]

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.

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...

  • Yeah, but I see your link is to "Text-based_user_interface", not "Terminal_user_interface". (Personally, I recall seeing "Textual" at least as often as "Text-based".)

    The styling "Terminal" is new to me; I'm not sure I've even ever seen it before this thread. That's the "new-fangled bit for gen-Z", as others in this sub-thread have bemoaned, AFAICS.

    And I must admit I rather agree with those bemoaners: It's stupid. Sure, you do run your TUI apps in the terminal, but the terminal itself is really a CLI, not a TUI. This makes the term rather misleading.

    So "Text[ual|-based] User Interface" is a far better reading of "TUI" than "Terminal User Interface", IM(ns)HO.

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

    • I don't think that search is very valid - the TUI group travel companies are likely much more mentioned than Terminal User Interface. They are pretty big around the world and have an airline, cruises, hotels etc.

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