Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadbunny | Hacker News Reader

In my experience the rise of GUIs over TUIs they lost the command buffering. If you knew what you were doing with a well designed TUI you could hit a sequence of keys that would be buffered and "replayed" as the next screen(s) loaded. Hit a sequence of commands in a GUI and they'll just get lost after the first one as the app/website loads.

View on HN

What you describe is the natural outcome of having a single message loop with synchronous handlers, and describes e.g. Win32 just as well - a sequence of keys would simply end up as the corresponding sequence of window messages in the queue, and processed in order.

Where we partially lost that is when UX started to get async. It's not fundamentally incompatible with well-ordered input messages, but in practice, people who write async code all too often forget that it's async all the way (and not just for their favorite scenario). And so you get travesties such as textboxes that let you type text into them, and then erase all that when the app or the page is "fully loaded".

Amen. I talked to some guys in their 20s in the oil and gas industry in Houston and they preferred using the old TUI systems because of this exact reason.

On a related note: the same is true for Keyboard Macros in Emacs, Vim etc. I often send a bunch of related, but each slightly different from the others, using Emacs keyboard macros and gnus. Felt great the first time I discovered it, saved perhaps 3 hours I would have spent writing and debugging a script.

The App Library feature is underrated. A clean screen and search is just so much better than having to scroll through page after page of icons.

Excuse me, what is TUI?

Terminal user interface

Thank you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com