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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?
Who would want to use them? Sure, we would, but we're by and large geeks. the 'normal' users can't handle anything that doesn't have pictures to keep them focused.
Who do I have to blackmail to get some representation around here!?!?!?!?
On my SPARC's and on my Mac running OpenBSD, I have found that the GUI is faster since the frame buffer has limited RAM, and therefor runs pretty slow at times. I have to agree that some GUI's are resource hogs, but with a small window manager on X, its just fine.
the "tile mode" of various elder consoles and current handheld gaming systems. Where the ability to program the character glyphs is part of the terminal protocol. If this were standardized on top of an existing console standard it'd pretty damn cool (best of both worlds). While an IBM PC BIOS is not capable of it, real framebuffers are easy to come by and could emulated it. And maybe you can design the protocol to gracefully degrade (graphical tiles will display garbage or have wrong colors, but at least the text parts can still be displayed).
You save memory on the side hosting the application (but not necessarily on the display, if it needs a seperate framebuffer).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I was just thinking about this today when I skipped down to the local public library to pick up some books for school. Whenever I go there, I grab the text-based console hickey instead of the new-fangled web-page based ones. Whoever designed that text one was a genius, and I wonder if the source is out. Truly, all the formatting and really small links on web pages only serve to get in the way of simple tasks like this one, and the omission of the mouse made it faster. Forced to use a mouse, I would waste precious time moving my hand around. Mice are the devil.
If someone drops a fort on Will, he makes a reflex save.
When I started my current job, my boss gave me his box and built himself a much faster one :) I put up with the fans in his old box for only a day before I decided I had to do something. I moved the box into the server room and brought in my laptop to use as a terminal. No more fan noise!
Pretty quickly I discovered that if I run all of my terminals in a screen session, I had much better control of them than if I ran separate xterms. You can only fit so many xterms on an X screen before you have to start using virtual screens, but you can easily fit dozens of terms into a screen session (I recompiled screen so I can have a hundred: I ran into the Debian version's maximum of 40 a few times). The best thing is, I can switch between them without using the goshdarned mouse. By giving them names, I can call them up with just a few keystrokes. Oh, it's nice. No more hunting. I want the screen I'm using to tail the apache log? It's ctrl-A ' log and I'm there.
When I go home at the end of the day, I just disconnect my screen session. When I ssh in from home to do some work, or when I come in the next day, I just run "screen -r" and I'm back where I left off. Exactly where I left off. No time wasted starting up xterms and getting them moved around. The log term is still tailing the log, the edit term is still in emacs, the test term is still waiting for me to run the tests again.
When I ssh into the noisy workstation, I use -X so I can run X applications if I want to... now and then the Gimp or feh or gv or some other GUIish thing, but running lots of terms in a screen session does lend itself to text mode applications. My email program is Pine, all text driven, and I like it just fine. Emacs in text mode, of course (no button bars for me!): Usually an emacs for each active project. When I switch from one task to another, I don't have to do anything but switch to the right screen session and start typing.
Text-mode programs and screen are all I need to rule the world (or at least the part of it that sits on my workstation).
i started working at my local CompUSA as a sales drone (please no jokes - i've been done there for years) when it 1st opened, and we had dumb terminals for our POS and inventory. this meant that a sales person could generate a quote at any inventory station, hand the customer a piece of paper and they in turn hand the paper to the cashier who enters the number at the top and takes the money. the cool thing (in my inexperienced humble opinion at the time) as that as sales (and returns) went through, the inventory would be updated in real time.
fast forward 3 months (yes, 3 months after the store opened!) and we moved over to a stupid frame-buffer based POS (it wasn't a GUI, you'll see why soon) that ran on some form of NT (i'm guessing NT4 because they looked like windows95 but these things had 24/7 uptime) now the cashiers had to know what key to press to do a specific thing (yes the dumb terminals had this too, but then they/we could tab from field to field) one operation at a time (it wasn't driven by the screen - as that was used to show the current recipt, and advertisements - but by the little green thing that shows the total!) with the new system, generated quotes were next to useless, (and soon we stopped generating them, and all but 1 printer used for those quotes disappeared from the sales floor) and, here is the best part: the inventory took up to 3 days to refresh! oh, we could still look up the all important % of service plans to everything else sold, but we couldn't rely on the computer to tell us what was in stock!
soon lines grew, due mostly to the lost productivity of the cashiers, and they haven't shrunk since.
today? the cashiers who knew the old system (yeah, there are one or two left) miss the good old says of the dumb terminals, and CompUSA still uses the POS that is a POS.
the moral of the story? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. especially after only 3 months from rollout.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
"nobody seems to use or think about text based user interfaces (TUI) anymore." That's not true at all; I for one use command-line interfaces multiple times every day, both on my Linux box and my Windows XP machine. I find command-line and TUI interfaces to be just as useful, often more powerful, and less distracting than modern GUI interfaces, and I know I'm not alone in this perspective.
yeah, i found this comment same as any made for other technologies. the advancement in technology is to help people. any change in current one is not so much readily accpeted by others. like when changin from hand held fans to electric ceiling fans, people were afraid to digest the fact that, these fans will not fall off on their heads!!! it took some time to accept the fact that newer technology is more usefl than the old. i don't say that the older ones are useless, but it's just that its a personal choice what we find easier to use. now a days people are fed up with all the gadgets humans have created and they prefere staying in coutry side where they will be away from amenities like mobile, fax, telephones and even electricity!!! and i think (TUI or tee-you-eye or too-yeee) is not much different. once people get fed up with some things they try to go back to the past things and say they are more useful. trying different things is in human nature. things (like GUI etc) are not invented/discovered abruptly they serve a specific purpose. if the purpose is solved for you, you can move on to the next thing, but this does not take away any importance of the previous one!
The GUI is cool but the CLI is still more powerful and more efficient. Anywhere you want to go on your drive takes only a couple commands. The GUI on the other hand requires a little more user intervention, even it means simply creating a shortcut.
CLI = cut to the chase
GUI = take the scenic route
You arrive at the same place. It just depends how fast you want to get there. And 3D desktops are coming. But it's going to take a long time for the transition. Remember, the more dimensions you add, the more coordination is needed.
"Must fit on a standard console (24x80)" and "Use of more input elements per screen". Any decent TUI will allow you create multi-page interfaces.
:-)
Right -- I may not have used correct terminology, but this is what I intended to say. I used "per screen" rather than "per page".
"Familiarity to users". Not really a big deal. TUIs tend to be very simple, and a lot of things that work in [insert your favorite GUI] work in TUIs as well - tab to move between fields, there's a standardized help key, etc.
True...but I'd still argue that Windows is a more standardized GUI environment than any TUI I can think of. In a TUI, what is the difference between BS and DEL? How, if there is any such method, do I transfer textual data from text field to text field? If the TUI supports text selection in text fields, how does it operate, and what keys control it? How do I move from the beginning to the end of the line or delete the word to the right or left of my cursor?
There are plenty of systems out there that let you work on multiple sessions through a single screen.
I use screen and XFree86 myself, but there is no guarantee of such functionality when using a typical TUI -- there are lots of terminals sitting about. I *know* that I have such functionality in a Windows-based GUI.
I can't argue about the "able to display images" part though.
After all that, I figured you were going to pull out aalib as an example.
Now, keep in mind -- all this doesn't necessarily mean that I think that GUIs are the way to go. I think that for POS, for equipment-control, for data-entry, and for a lot of kiosk applications, TUIs are the way to go. Heck, I do all my file management on a CLI, as well as most of my work (well, aside from most of my web browsing). I wasn't intending to argue that GUIs were unilaterally superior to TUIs -- just to point out the advantages that I feel that GUIs have over TUIs. TUIs have their own (sizeable) set of advantages -- I just didn't list them, since they didn't seem all that germane to the thread. It certainly wasn't intended to be bashing the gurus of the amber screen.
As a matter of fact, I think that the recent debacle on Slashdot about National City's CMU ATM is a great example. It used to be an old but reliable TUI system. Apparently, it didn't look new and sexy enough (and as financial services people on Slashdot pointed out, failed to allow the pushing of multimedia ads to users). It was replaced with an WinXP-based (hey, easy to produce a GUI with) touchscreen kiosk. It crashed at some point, dumping the interface out to Windows, which gleeful students happily tinkered with with, eventually ending up playing Beethoven on loop at the maximum sound level the poor kiosk could put out. If National City had simply stuck with their simple, reliable TUI, they wouldn't have had people monkeying around with the innards of their cash-dispensing systems.
May we never see th
I agree with you, NAIM has a really nice interface once you figure it out. Have you ever chatted with the author? He is still the default contact on every NAIM install. I think that is pretty cool. On his web page he mentions that he meets at least 10 people a day from new installs.
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A lot of other posters have already explained reasons why they are, so instead of rehashing their arguments, I'll just give some real-world examples with which I was involved.
My mother had two stores at one point, both of which used computerized point-of-sale systems. The system was DOS and worked pretty well. It did the reporting she needed, interfaced with mechanized cash drawers, a poll display, and a bar code scanner. Things worked pretty well, and it was even networked and had two machines. She was much happier than with the old system of a cash register with a lot of hand inventory keeping.
Then, the vendor decided to come out with a new Windows based system. She was very reluctant to change because the new system meant having to buy all new hardware and some new training for her and her employees as many of the screens had changed. But, she couldn't continue to get support for the old DOS based system because the vendor, understandably, wanted to only support their new Windows-based system.
So, the new system was installed. Aside from the enormous migration problems which aren't relevant here, she was really unhappy with it. Mice do NOT work well in a retail environment where they are used constantly and get gunk inside their roller balls and buttons. Employees tended to not learn shortcut keys because they seemed to perceive the mouse as easier to use, whereas in the old DOS system, they had no choice but to use keys. The keyboards were beasts and never seemed to die, but the mice did.
There were no new features that interested her at all; she forked out the $10K+ to upgrade because she had to. During the holiday season, the cashiers were slower with the new system than with the old one, in general, partly because they didn't use shortcut keys and partly because shortcut keys weren't always usable in all screens and situations.
Done properly, a GUI can be just as effective as a TUI, but all too many times, a lot of the GUIs I've seen for repetitive tasks (e.g., telemarketing data entry, POS, etc.) are horribly inaccessable. Since TUIs, at least to some degree, have to be accessable, they often work better.