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Comment by KPGv2 | Hacker News Reader

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They aren’t the same thing. TUI refers to interactive ncurses-like interfaces. Vim has a TUI, ls does not

I’m fairly certain this terminology has been around since at least the early aughts.

I don't know when the term became widespread for gui-style terminal programs, but the wikipedia entry has existed for more than 20 years so I think it is an older term than you imply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text-based_user_i...

Yeah, but I see your link is to "Text-based_user_interface", not "Terminal_user_interface". (Personally, I recall seeing "Textual" at least as often as "Text-based".)

The styling "Terminal" is new to me; I'm not sure I've even ever seen it before this thread. That's the "new-fangled bit for gen-Z", as others in this sub-thread have bemoaned, AFAICS.

And I must admit I rather agree with those bemoaners: It's stupid. Sure, you do run your TUI apps in the terminal, but the terminal itself is really a CLI, not a TUI. This makes the term rather misleading.

So "Text[ual|-based] User Interface" is a far better reading of "TUI" than "Terminal User Interface", IM(ns)HO.

Sorry, but this 65 yo grey-beard disagrees. A TUI to me, back in the 80s/90s, was something that ran in the terminal and was almost always ncurses-based. This was back when I was still using ADM-3A serial terminals, none of that new-fangled PCs stuff.

Exactly. A CLI is a single line - like edlin. A TUI takes over all or most of the screen, like edit or vi or emacs.

Norton Commander (or Midnight Commander) is probably the quintessential example of a powerful TUI; it can do things that would be quite hard to replicate as easily in a CLI.

We might've been caught on different parts of the wave. I checked Ngrams out of curiosity

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TUI&year_start...

Basically it was never used, then it was heavily used, and then never used, and then in the early 00s it took off again.

That'd explain why you used it, I never did, and now young kids are.

Thanks for looking that up! It makes sense, of course - the line starts to drop in 1984, with the release of the Macintosh, and hits a trough around the launch of Windows 95.

It's not a term I recall hearing at all when I started using computers in the mid-'80s - all that mattered back then was "shiny new GUI, or the clunky old thing?" I really thought it was a retroneologism when I first heard it, maybe twenty years ago.

I don't think that search is very valid - the TUI group travel companies are likely much more mentioned than Terminal User Interface. They are pretty big around the world and have an airline, cruises, hotels etc.

Yeah, but Preussag only changed its name to Touristik Union International in 1997[1], so I think the user interface interpretation clearly predates the travel agency one.

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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUI_Group

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