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If you don't want people calling these apps TUIs, what would you prefer people call them? And what does the term TUI refer to, if not this?

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ASCII art (or ASCII art interface)

Text User Interface.

But what _is_ a "Text User Interface"? Google Images just returns what is being discussed here: "GUIs" that run in some kind of text mode. And to me, that's also what a TUI is.

A more textually oriented environment (like a normal Unix shell) is, in my experience, usually referred to as a CLI: Command Line Interface.

I did find an interesting hybrid in the Pi coding agent: it seems to leverage the normal terminal scrollback, while still enhancing it with things like transient input fields and status lines, so that it can display those without cluttering scrollback.

That's pretty much the distinction. A CLI is stream-oriented, may accept user input from standard in and/or write to standard out with buffered I/O; a TUI is full-screen, interactive (responds immediately to keystrokes), and uses text characters to represent visual elements.

And that’s where my comment came in.

I see TUI as a more general term: a program based in a terminal.

In my mind it does not imply it has to be an ASCII GUI style thing and not just a stream oriented non-interactive program.

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