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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

This is the first I've read of "TUI" standing for what I have to assume is "terminal user interface"? I'd call them CLI (command line interface). When did this TUI acronym start? What does it mean? Everyone else seems to know it and use it without defining.

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I dont know when it exactly started but I've heard and use this term at least 15 years. CLI != TUI. TUI is more like a "standard" window (GUI) but all text based.

Well... CLI is Command Line Interface, or a classic ./name --options reading output in a terminal and writing options, piping to other tools to tweak the output. It's good for some usages, and for scripting, but not much for event-loop based activities.

TUI, Textual User Interface today tend to be a 2D terminal graphic, from ncurses to framebuffer. Classically it's simply a 2D UI based on text, so for instance Plan 9 ACME editor is a TUI since it's graphic but you can write text anywhere creating and changing menus, toolbars etc.

I think there is no official Jargon File entry to clarify this, 99% of the time people name TUI an ncurses UI, witch is a debatable since it can be not really usable as text and so as Terminal User Interface, but a CLI is also a terminal user interface.

CLIs can be graphical too! One classic example is AutoCAD:

> The command line interface provides an important method for controlling AutoCAD. For many users, it is the primary input method. The command line is also used for displaying and selecting command options.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/OARX/2024/ENU/?guid=GUID-F145...

Very right indeed, maybe then:

- GUI :: graphical UI, typically NOT easy to mold by the end users, mostly widget based UIs, as their main characteristic or the user of them is more a consumer than a producer of something;

- CLI :: a REPL, typically a terminal, but definitively not only that, their users enter commands, read responses as main characteristic;

- TUI :: a 2D UI (typically though it could probably be also a 3D and 4D one) easy to be mold by the end user, the user is both a producer and a consumer as their main characteristic. An WYSIWYG editor is a kind of TUI in that regard, an Emacs buffer is another since in both text can be entered somewhat freely and can became "active" like clickable links. The user read, or consume, but also write, or produce.

An ncurses UI should be TUI being text-based and 2D but still lack the user mold part so well... Still unsure how to classify the acronym...

I've also never heard this term. Back when text interfaces for mail were the default, but they started getting "fancy" like elm, pine and mutt in the 90s, they were always called curses or ncurses interfaces. When GUIs became a thing, the older things became called text-mode, but I've never encountered TUI before.

The only TUI that I'd heard of is the travel company.

curses and ncurses are specific libraries used while TUI is a more universal term.

But what does it actually stand for? Terminal user interface? Text user interface? I'm not complaining or saying it shouldn't be used, I'd just never seen it before and my initial searches for TUI were all overloaded with other things.

> But what does it actually stand for? Terminal user interface? Text user interface?

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface

The Wikipedia page is from 2004, so it's been around a while.

I've seen TUI used for at least a decade? Things like this used to be just called "GUIs" even when running fully in text-mode back in the DOS days.

IMO "ed" is a CLI (i.e. the primary form of interaction is a command line), and "vi" is a TUI.

It's been in use since at least the late 1980s to early 1990s. I believe it was in the Turbo Pascal for DOS documentation I used back then, as well as Turbo Vision and some other things. I also worked on a TUI library for Euphoria in DOS around that time.

And it means a full-screen Text User Interface, which is quite different from a line-oriented CLI (Command Line Interface). Instead of a command line, you have a full screen interface with menus, dialogs, buttons, checkboxes and radios, listboxes, windows, scrollbars, etc. Just all in text mode using things like the box drawing and shading characters.

So at least 30 years ago. Probably the early 80s, although I'm not sure of that. But that's when some programs started going from CLI or forms-based to actually using that full-screen TUI style.

The earlier forms-based programs were basically just a hard-coded text-mode screen with blank fields that you could fill in the blanks, then hit a key to either submit, escape back out, or use a hotkey to pull up a different form screen. They didn't have the various interface widgets that we got used to with the TUIs and later GUIs.

You've charted an incredibly fortuitous TUI-avoiding path through your HN reading, it pops up constantly. Just in the last year:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

vim and midnight commander are TUI

bash and git are CLI

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