Hacker News Reader

Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

I honestly wish someone had come up with some text markup language and "browser" so enterprise developers could deploy text UI apps. The web is just awful for the back office people. Frankly, I wonder how much money is being spent on the web when a TUI would have been more productive.

View on HN

That's literally how IBM block terminals operated, and it was AFAIK most visible with CICS which was designed around similar model to Web 1.0 apps - blocks of code ("transactions") in CICS would send a (possibly multipage) form to terminal, then when the terminal send back the response (usually just the filled in fields of the form) another transaction would get fired and perform processing on it, and so on and so on.

Of course the screens had rudimentary markup to support this including client-side validation of sorts.

I personally don't care about how it's implemented, markup or otherwise, I'd just be happy to see TUIs return in numbers for modern terminal emulators. SSH apps are slowly becoming a thing, thankfully, but not quickly enough for my liking.

Does Wish fit the bill?

https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish

I like the idea of a Text UI markup language. It's envisage some kind of nested table describing the layout? More declarative?

I -think- that it might be possible to do so something like ncurses forms.

Honestly I work with SAP and for power users we still implement text UIs for certain special tasks. SAP's language ABAP is actually optimized for this and it works amazingly well. You can implement in 20 minutes a working UI that does a lot.

I’m an ex-Peoplesoft dev and the productivity was pretty mind blowing in that environment. More recently I was involved with a SAP project, and the development estimates for what seemed like trivial things were days and weeks. Your experience and my experience differ. Maybe the developers were just excessively padding?

Yeah, SAP folk are always very conservative. A lot of stuff is actually quite fast, but you need to know an incredible tech stack nowadays going literally back to the 80s to new technology. But if you're in the known, it's fast.

Someone could write a curses package in web assembly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com