Text Based User Interfaces in the 21st Century?

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?

Comments

Lowest Common Denominator

[ka9dgx]

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--

An idea: you could start with newt

[Ayanami Rei]

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.