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Comment by raingrove | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool! It's kinda amusing that we've gone from TUI (VisiCalc/Lotus 1-2-3) to GUI (Excel), and back to TUI though.

cursor-addressing uis likely have a higher barrier to entry (both for developers and users), so they are not suffering from the regression to the mean that has made modern guis absolutely unusable.

that, and there aren't any "ui/ux designers" specialising in cursor-addressing uis.

What do you mean precisely by "character addressing UI"? I can infer approximately what you mean, but I had never heard that phrase before and could not Google it, so was wondering how precisely you define that as presumably slightly distinct from other more common terms for text mode applications.

thanks! i meant 'cursor-addressing', to avoid the ambiguous term 'tui', which usually (and per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface) means cursor-addressing, but nominally also includes actual text-based user interfaces, as seen in e.g. the traditional unix utilities.

I've always seen CLI used for unix style utilities and TUI used for cursor-addressing/ncurses style interfaces fwiw.

You still didnt define what "cursor addressing" means. Its not a common term to use for these UIs and doesnt seem to get to the crux of what separates a typical GUI from these.

For me, the crucial difference is that they're usable over ssh and tmux, not the type of cursor they have (if any).

I take it you haven't heard about: https://charm.sh/

Interesting that Website reliably crashes mobile Firefox (nightly and release) and brave for me.

Works fine on my Pixel 7a using the release version of Firefox (I won't dare touch Brave), fwiw.

> and there aren't any "ui/ux designers" specialising in cursor-addressing uis.

Depends where you look.

https://davideellis.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/ibm-tivoli-moni...

Not really. There is an ancient curses-based spreadsheet program called "sc" (spreadsheet calculator).

It sounds like "scim" is to "sc" vaguely like "vim" is to "vi": new program with more features cloning/imitating ancient program.

"vi" was written by Bill Joy in 1979.

"sc" by James Gosling in 1981.

sc-im claims to be based on "sc".

It's a direct lineage unrelated to GUI spreadsheets.

Gosling wrote sc? I had no idea. I was an scim user before moving to visidata like another poster mentioned, so I kinda-sorta feel like an sc user.

For those who don't know, James Gosling invented a popular VM-based "write once, test everywhere" programming language named after a tree. Then named after a coffee.

Gosling also invented a structural macro processor for C, in 1989.

Ace: a syntax-driven C preprocessor: https://swtch.com/gosling89ace.pdf

In 1981, Gosling Emacs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

Richard Stallman used Gosling Emacs as the starting code for GNU Emacs.

For those who don't know, and don't want to have to go off and search to understand the cryptic comment... He's talking about Java. Which in an earlier iteration was known as Oak.

It reminded me of The Twin spreadsheet from the late 1980s. I worked at a plastics plant that used it in their color lab until at least 2013 when I left. There were thousands of color recipes and no one wanted to try and convert all of that to a newer spreadsheet.

https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/7590/software-spotli...

No one has gone back for real spreadsheet work tho

The great drawback of TUI app is that are quite unusable from touch devices, or generally devices without a keyboard). If you find a way to make them usable on mobile I think they can get a great comeback

> If you find a way to make them usable on mobile

And if that requires any tradeoffs like it did for GUIs (no hover, no small elements) it'll end up getting dumbed down for mobile like GUIs did.

If you can find a way to make touch-friendly interfaces useful on desktop devices with a large screen and a keyboard maybe then they'll take off.

Better yet, make all user interfaces the same as a toaster. Everyone can use a toaster. Bread goes in, push the lever. One universal way of thinking for everyone and everything. No domination by the tyranny of choice.

You might have not seen different kind of tosters.

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