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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

Can somebody explain why we need another acronym that appears to mean the same thing as CLI?

Edit: Gotta love these downvotes. Punishing people for trying to patch holes in their knowledge is a great teaching strategy. Stay curious, folks

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A TUI is not a CLI, but a GUI that 'happens' to render in a terminal environment, restricted to the features available there. (mostly ANSI escape codes)

It's a common acronym.

> It's a common acronym...

Thanks! Learned something new today.

Wikpedia has you covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface ;)

Do you mean TUI (Terminal User Interface)? It is not the same as a CLI (Command Line Interface). A CLI is text-prompt based: run a single command, get a response.

A TUI is an interactive program with keybindings, where one can navigate around, do actions and the screen will update to reflect the new state. Basically like a X11/win32 GUI, but inside a terminal window.

Ironically the best CLIs are also TUIs, but unix shells don't really seem to have caught onto that yet. For instance, in bash/fish/zsh, why can't I scroll up and mouse click on a command I ran earlier to edit and run it again? I can do that in my scheme repl in emacs. It's a richer experience.

> Punishing people for trying to patch holes in their knowledge is a great teaching strategy.

I didn't downvote you, but the general tone of the comment is a bit sarcastic...? It hears like that people has made up another useless word as the same way people criticizing things like 'JAMstack' or 'Big Data', etc...

You're right that your original comment was fine, but the edit breaks the guidelines, which guarantees further downvotes. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html all the way to the end.

I know, and almost never mention downvotes, but in this case I think it worth mentioning because it's such a common antipattern:

https://xkcd.com/1053/

It doesn't mean the same. It doesn't have a command line (although it might be started from one), but a text-based UI inside the application, so it isn't a CLI, but a TUI.

If it says CLI, I tend to think of it as a normal command that runs and spits out some output (or nothing). A TUI means a full-screen, long-running, interactive application.

So if this were a CLI for lobste.rs, I'd assume it just fetches the stories and prints them.

Git is a CLI, lazygit is a TUI

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