I prefer tui's for two reasons. 1. Very used to vi keybindings 2. I like low resources software. I love the ability to open the software in less than a second in a second do what I needed using vi motions. And close it less than a second.

Some people will be like you save two seconds trying to do something simple. You lose more time building the tool than you will use it in your life.

It's not about saving time. It's about eliminating the mental toll from having to context switch(i know it sounds ai, reading so much ai text has gotten to me)

> an interactive page that can be navigated around with the keyboard

Or mouse / trackpad.

I really haven't seen anything better for making TUIs than Borland's Turbo Vision framework from 35ish years ago.

So the acronym is for Terrible User Interface? ;)

It's gotten more popular for sure, but it's definitely been around a long time. Even just on HN there have been conversation about gdb tui ever since I've been here (starting browsing HN around 2011). For anyone who works in embedded systems it's a very common term and has been since I got into it in 2008-ish. I would guess it was much more of a linux/unix user thing until recently though, so people on windows and mac probably rarely if ever intersected with the term, so that's definitely a change. Just my observations.

As someone who came up using Borland's Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Turbo Vision (their OOP UI framework), it was called CUI (character-based user interface) to distinguish from GUI, which became relevant as Windows became dominant.

I never heard "TUI" until the last few years, but it may be due to my background being Microsoft-oriented.

One of the only references I can find is the PC Magazine encyclopedia: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/cui

My friends and I have been actively in the "CLI/TUI" since middle school. Anyone tinkering on linux that used tiling window managers is already very familiar with the domain.

It's been around as long as TUI tools have been around (Midnight Commander, etc)

Here's a blog post from 2014 [1] mentioning it.

Sometimes, we're the one in today's 10000, sometimes it's someone else [2]

[1] https://khanifnasrudin.blogspot.com/2014/11/text-based-user-... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Textual / Text-based UI used to be more common.

Makes more sense, too: Although you run TUI apps in it, the terminal itself is inherently more of a CLI than a TUI. Makes "terminal" rather misleading, IMO.