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Text Based User Interfaces in the 21st Century?

Posted by Cliff on from the lose-the-rodent dept.

Jaap Geurts asks: "With the 3D GUI desktop around the corner, nobody seems to use or think about text based user interfaces (TUI) anymore. I know that hardware comes cheap nowadays but can the use of TUIs still be justified? I've always found that GUIs are resource hungry, generally slower and more importantly they often allow multitasking and they are very unpleasant without a mouse! What do you think about developing a (well designed) TUI for DB software (e.g Point of sale, Warehouse manager, etc)? Most current GUI metaphors can be implemented so what are the pros and cons from a user perspective?" Are there any real reasons against deploying text-based applications, today?

4 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Lowest Common Denominator by ka9dgx · · Score: 4, Informative
    The fact is that a console screen is fairly easy to generate, heck even the IBM PC BIOS supported console input. You'll always have it there when you really need to dig into the guts of a system.

    It takes a lot of things going just right in order to be able to display and keep a GUI going. In terms of RAM and CPU cycles, a console session is a few orders of magnitude cheaper to run.

    --Mike--

  2. An idea: you could start with newt by Ayanami+Rei · · Score: 4, Informative

    Newt is a toolkit for making text mode user interfaces. It has C, TCL, python and perl bindings.

    It's a RedHat thing but it's apparently become popular (available on Debian, FreeBSD, well anything that has ncurses). It supports UTF-8 which is nice.

    That'd sort of be your toolkit (ala GTK). So you're halfway there.

    --
    THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
  3. best text user interface... by burns210 · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... was turbovision. it ran turbopascal and turboc++(others?), and was a desktop/windows UI using text characters as windows and such, very powerful and light weight. Would be awesome to have a 'gui' over ssh command line action. one example off of Google Image Search. Very cool system, and it is GPLed, too!

  4. Two Major Reasons by pete-classic · · Score: 3, Informative

    1. Scriptablity.

    You can write a shell script for most tasks that you already know how to do from the command line trivially. Others can be a bit tricky, but tools such as expect usually make it possible.

    Scripting a gui is usually only possible with special applications that scrape the screen and allow you to make macros. Some gui apps (notably KDE) have built-in scriptablity, but only to the extent that the developer goes out of his way to add it.

    2. Efficiency.

    For a good discussion see "The Pragmatic Programmer."

    While textual interfaces have an inherently steeper learning curve, they are far more efficient for the experienced user.

    This manifests in several ways. For example; all command line functionality is at the "top level" of the interface. One needn't click start before invoking grep, or click a pull-down to get to the case-insensitivity option.

    -Peter