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Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

I long for an alternate dimension where terminal-based internet like Minitel dominated .

Something like hypercard implemented with 80x24 ncurses UI

ELisp and Emacs UI tools under the TTY version it's close.

Also, check gopher and gopher://magical.fish under Lynx or Sacc. The news section it's pretty huge for what you can get with very, very little bandwidth.

gopher://midnight.pub and gopher:/sdf.org are fun too.

And, OFC, the tilde/pubnix concept. SDF it's awesome.

I love TUI (as in text-based user interfaces) so much more than GUI. It always felt like a far more peaceful and productive environment.

As long as I have ctrl+c/v copy and pasting I'm right there with you.

don't you mean yy and p?

this comment is based

vim-based

vim-enhanced

vi-improved

I think you mean M-w and C-y.

For DOS TUI, the standard was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access: Shift+Delete to cut, Ctrl+Insert to copy, Shift+Insert to paste. These worked in DOS utilities like EDIT.COM, QBASIC.EXE and HELP.EXE, in all Turbo Vision apps including Borland Pascal and Borland C++ IDEs, in Visual Basic and Visual FoxPro for DOS, and they still work today in any Windows app that doesn't try to play silly tricks with its UI by doing its own text input.

Thanks for posting the link.

Shift+Insert has worked for decades in the XTerms I've used. It's bound in my muscle memory and is a source of frustration, for me, when attempting to use non-X Widows GUIs or odd-ball "terminals"/programs/foo.

Responsive, high-contrast, low bitrate, low complexity

I love the idea of TUIs, but I honestly don't have a lot of experience with them. There's a lovely Go library called Wish that I keep looking for reasons to use. https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish

charm bracelet has some really great projects and my obsession for TUI interfaces is why I'm learning Go so that I can use one of their libraries in a peoject

The real power of the internet all along in my opinion was networked databases. Everything else is fluff and not a particularly great use of resources.

networked spreadsheets would have been ideal

Command line dominates in quick flexibility. But is awful when it comes to discoverability. Most people can't even find the turn off ads button in windows 11. And people hate that. So what hope do they have at a terminal.

I think Ms Dos 6ish TUI integration was very well done, better than Linux today.

Word perfect had good mouse support, as did Editor.

I have a theory that TUI is masculine and GUI is feminine.

To be fair, would the button isn't hidden away too badly, most people have no reason to go into settings for anything. They go through the wizard at the beginning (if that) to do first-time setup, then when they decide they don't like something they just deal with it or complain incessantly until someone fixes it for them.

Someone complained to me a while back about the size of icons on the windows desktop being too small - I told them they can hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel to change the zoom level. They've complained about the same thing a couple times since, and so far as I can tell have made no effort to fix it.

Talking to people, settings terrifies them.

"Most people can't even find the turn off ads button in windows 11"

Perhaps the problem there is incentives.

ncurses!

TurboVision!

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