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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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