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Comment by sdfjkl | Hacker News Reader

Turbo Vision is odd. It's a backport of a graphical UI (Windows 3.0) to text mode. It was exceptionally well done in both end user and developer ease of use and caught on.

But I doubt it's the optimum for a text based UI, at least for most applications. Keep evolving!

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IIRC both Windows and TV where modeled after the IBM Common User Access (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access) interface style, which was a somewhat big theme in the late 80s and early 90s.

Its fun seeing some of the vestigial CUA key bindings in modern apps. The one I probably use the most is F5 in the browser to refresh the page. That is listed in your Wikipedia page:

> If applicable to the page/screen in question F5 provides a refresh function;

I still use the original CUA Ctrl-Ins / Shift-Ins / Shift-Del for Copy / Paste / Cut at least as often as the newfangled Macintosh-copied Ctrl-C/V/X. They still work in (most?) Windows apps even if they aren't advertised as shortcuts in the Edit menu.

Also influenced by the original Mac UI, which influenced Motif, which influenced later toolkits. It was a great time for standard interfaces, which has gotten worse since, imho.

You're not wrong, I remember a lot of turbo vision apps loved to use the MDI, multiple document interface, paradigm where each application was like a mini OS with unique windows you could resize and place as you please. This was fine when you were in DOS and could only run one application at a time, entirely fullscreen. But nowadays MDI on a multitasking OS with multiple things running at once is a weird anachronism, like you're running an OS inside an OS. It's confusing and not good.

You can use turbo vision for good interfaces though. Just have to be careful not to fall into the tropes of 30 year old pre-multitasking OS application design.

MDI is completely optional in TUI apps. It only enters the picture if you have multiple documents open within the same terminal/app session, otherwise you simply get the single document view. This applies to Emacs "windows" as much as any TUI in DOS.

This is usually handled by tabs today... not sure that has been ported back to libs like turbo vision yet. I don't think so.

Tab bars are not very TUI friendly though, since the typical TUI has too little space to display a list of usable tab names at all times. Instead there's simply a hotkey which pops up a "window list" for the user to switch to. (There are exceptions when space is genuinely abundant and a side list of "views" or "tabs" to switch to can be kept permanently visible, but they are exceptions.)

Here the TUI designer profits from being able to assume that the user can navigate using the keyboard, as opposed to implementing "keyboard shortcuts" as a purely additional feature. (The GUI on the other hand can use design 'tweaks' to minimize the wasted space and perhaps distraction that would normally result from showing an always-visible tab list.)

Hmm, I don't agree, with terminals post 2000 or so.

My GUI text editor is currently showing about 8 tabs out of a dozen, with ◂ ▸ at the ends. This is comparable to the number of cells in my terminal now, ~100, i.e.:

    ◂│doc_one.txt ╲ doc_two.txt ╲ doc_three.tx… ╲ doc_four.tx… ╲ doc_five.tx… ╲ │▸

This is 78 "characters" wide and has extra spaces. This is enough space for typical needs, and could work even on relatively dumb terms like the linux console, DOS of yesteryear. A vte high-color term with utf8, 120+ cells wide could potentially double capacity, in number of tabs, filename length, or bit of both.

> But I doubt it's the optimum for a text based UI, at least for most applications.

Why do you think so? When I came across the first Newt apps years later (Red Hat installer and tools) I was actually surprised how less user-friendly and intuitive these newer TUIs were wen compared to TV.

One big advantage of TV was that it was consistent: when you learned how to use one app, you more or less knew how to use all other TV-based apps.

There were text mode UIs well before Windows 3.0 - Microsoft had their own TUIs, similar to Turbo Vision but with a subtly different style. They even supported a "monochrome mode" option that wouldn't look out of place on a VT-100 terminal.

Also reminded of the Norton DOS tools, which were interesting in themselves.

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