Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

Also, Costco uses AS/400. Applications that are pure function over form are amazing

Foxpro is alive and well in our town water utilities company. My fellow student still works on it. I don't know a worse way to waste your best years.

They are managed via terminal probably, but only few cases the business application runs as TUI.

I still use a dot matrix in my office lol. I love the sound and they are so cheap to operate.

I supported a lumberyard that was like this too. Also, some "modern" laser machines required ancient versions of Windows and required floppy discs. This was about 20 years ago, though.

I noticed Guitar Center also using a TUI when I was in there last.

A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100% usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications take the time to do that design.

Devil's advocate: There is one thing GUIs do better than TUIs: international text. Try to present on the same terminal screen text in Arabic and Japanese.

Acquiring the skill to fly through such interfaces is equivalent to learning to play a musical instrument, where the desired attention (taking cues) and action (body/finger movement) becomes second nature. Such skill and interfaces are, unfortunately, not viewed as similarly valued as playing a musical instrument, and such visual presentation of the TUI is thought to be "difficult" to use, and they do take learning and effort to achieve that level of mastery. Meanwhile, the interface to traditional musical instruments, while there's been some changes and improvements, have stood the test of time and remain attractive to a lot people who want to make music. Many of the claimed "improvements" that GUI interfaces have over TUIs look in some cases, to me, like busy box toys created for toddlers (this is how I feel about the Windows Ribbon menu widgets). Once something becomes second nature, it's not "I'm putting my fingers in this position" it is "I want to play an A after this series of other notes".

I experienced the same thing. The big Brokerage firm I worked for in the 90s had amazing TUIs. You could fly through the screens. They even had DMs and group chats. Pretty amazing. The next company I worked for was rolling-out a GUI replacement for their TUI interface and I watched people's productivity plummet as they went from keyboard, to mouse for every text box... Those old mainframe TUIs were amazing, probably the result of decades of time and motion studies.

I remember seeing how past people were in 1-2-3 for DOS using the / menu back in the 90's.

TUIs have a high speed ceiling when muscle memory comes into play.

Sounds like the UX designers for the new applications didn't understand the requirements. I worked on two web app projects that required to be usable fast and with keyboards only. It's not that hard, if you define the requirements right.

Also no scrolling was a requirement. This was done by defining a min and max screen resolution, and designing everything exactly for that. The app was supposed to be used exclusively full screen, so no need for responsive design.

The result was a bit like a video game, very few loading delays and instant responses to user input.

I was making this argument in early 2000s, how the "upgrade" would kill efficiency - and it largely did for data entry. I did this swap in medical industry and finance industry and it landed on deaf ears all the time in the name of modernization. Actually, feels like I'm reliving it right now with AI.

Nice - thank you!

Eh, I bet a lot of this stuff is running on some old SCO box held together with ducttape and prayers, because the vendor is long gone/dead.

People who are good programmers say this, they have this fantasy, but it's a myth. The opposite is of course true, because there is no maintenance, there are a bajillion agonizing bugs and people simply work around them, the "small fixes" live inside the heads of the people using the application.

Like the fantasy is that the bank uses TUIs and the bank has accumulated years of knowledge and the bank doesn't make mistakes. The bank has extremely well paid staff. Joe Shmoe's TUI app looks like the bank's app, but it is unmaintained, it has accumulated years of problems, not fixes, nobody is fixing them, people who say they fix them cannot possibly be keeping up with the sheer amount of toil and bugs needed for production software. You can see this in any GitHub project, how much insane maintenance is required, for stuff people actually use and has few bugs.

Just the fact that you can use the keyboard is brilliant. I teach high school and most of my computing tasks are in lowest-bidder web GUI messes (lousy UX, no hotkeys) and take so much longer than a keyboard interface would. Even taking roll takes a minute or two longer than it used to.

I remember training a new hire on her first day and, about an hour in, she said she needed a coffee break. I never saw her again lol.

Typically the first two weeks of training revolved around new hires asking why in the world we used this system before their spirits broke and they reluctantly plunged into the deep end...kind of like being released into the matrix.

I agree with basically everything you've said, but I'd add that I sometimes wish we had a way to sometimes pop up a GUI for very specific tasks.

For example, enabling a fast multi-select of rows in a longish table (or even worse, a tree) is one of the tasks that TUIs don't really excel at. Popping up a PDF or image viewer would also be great.

The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and is accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.

> I will say that these systems take time and effort to learn. You have to commit these UI paths to memory, which isn't too hard, but in order to be maximally effective, you also have to memorize a lot of product metadata.

One thing that often gets lost in the discussion of TUIs vs GUIs is that this is also true of GUIs. You have to know which icon to click, and it's not always in the same place, and not always labeled. Increasingly, functionality is hidden behind a hamburger menu, and not laid out in logical sections like File, Edit, View, etc menus.

> We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode.

GUIs can have keyboard shortcuts too. I'm an artist and I work two-handed: right hand moves the stylus around the screen, left hand floats around the keyboard and changes tools, summons control panels, etc. Whenever I try a different program than the one I'm used to, and have to poke at icons with my right hand because I don't know its shortcuts, I feel like half my brain's idling.

This is about keyboard navigation rather than TUI vs GUI, there is no reason you have to render your app with plain text to support efficient keyboard nav.

You're right to point out the speed, but it is just not true that GUIs can't be fast. You can have screens that load quickly and shortcut keys etc.

You just have to make fast navigation and data entry a high priority. The assumptions and approaches people make today mean that generally isn't the case. With a TUI there is a hard limit on the amount of data you can load and that helps as a starting point.

- Often it's hitting a server is that is far away rather in the same building.

  - you can put the web server in the same building

- Each page is very heavy with lots of JavaScript etc. loading

  - you can build lightweight web pages if you priority small script size, minimal dependencies,
    and do profiling to keep things in check

- Data loading delays rendering

  - limit the amount of data loaded and displayed at one time

- Data is slow to load

  - an older system has limited capacity meaning it's not an option to keep inactive data around
  - this means data is more likely to be indexed
  - new systems have very large storage capacities, leading to a larger and larger growing db
  - eventually default configuration for the database does not allow for everything active to be indexed
  - solution is to keep inactive data out of active tables being queried for normal operations

- Slow to navigate with mouse

  - you can create a keyboard navigation system
  - you can build keyboard shortcuts into every screen
  - you can create autocomplete shortcut commands to jump to screens

When we built systems in the early 90's (non web GUI), typical requirements were that login/startup would at most take a few seconds and any user action would have to be satisfied with sub second response time. I often think about that when I am waiting for the third SSO redirection to complete or the web page to complete its 200 web requests after a single click. We gained a lot but efficiency seems to have taken a backseat in many cases.

> UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago.

I'm going to push back a little on that. For several years, MacOS followed a strong UX convention with consistent keyboard shortcuts, menus, layout order, and more. Similarly, Microsoft started with the same, but with everything reversed. At the time, most major cross-platform apps followed these conventions.

Two periods broke these rules: the expansion of web apps and Apple's pivot towards the consolidation of everything into iOS.

First was the dawn of web apps. Faced with two opposing standards, web apps didn't know which model to follow. Business sites stuck with MS standards, while design-centric sites followed Mac standards. As those broke consistency, cross-platform apps gave up and defined their own standards.

Mobile platforms tried to establish new standards. iOS was mostly successful, but started slipping around iOS 7. Material Design was supposed to standardize Android, but Google used it for all Google products, making it more of a standard for the Google brand than Android.

The second started around WWDC 2019. At that point, Apple deprioritized UX standards to focus on architecture updates. The following year, Catalyst was literally a UX catalyst, introducing two competing UX standards for MacOS. From that point forward, Apple really hasn't had a singular UX standard to follow anymore, but they seem to be marching towards iOS standards for all devices.

Times have changed. Priorities have changed.

In the heyday of TUIs, job attrition was much lower. It made sense to create a tool that was extremely hard to use, but also extremely efficient once learned.

In the modern days, attrition is much higher, especially in retail. You need to focus on discoverability and simplifying training as much as possible. Efficiency is secondary at best.

There is nothing stopping someone from designing GUI stemming from same rules. It just won't "look pretty" and be easy to sell to the suits.

There is also trend with "modern" UI/UX to focus near entirety of effort on user's first few minutes and first few hours with a software, while near zero thought is being put on users having to use given piece of software for hours at end, day in, day out

> It's absolutely crazy that a well designed TUI is so much faster. It turns out that if you never change the UI and every menu item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how fast you can physically push the buttons.

Bloomberg Terminal basically. And then because of muscle memory, it's so hard for users to get used to another system. And then they push it onto their juniors. And then you get to charge companies $250 per head to train juniors on how to use the system, with all of its textbased commands.

"We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode."

I use text-mode every day

Cannot speak for others but I lost nothing. On the contrary I gained faster hardware and faster network

> Many (most?) older retail businesses still use TUIs. They're reliable, consistent, and orders of magnitude faster than GUI systems.

What is sad is that is doesn't have to be that way. But you describe is not an intrisic characteristic of a TUI, but of using keyboard instead of a mouse. You can write a webapp that performs in the same way (modulo the resources needed of course), but it takes extra time and once it works with a mouse there little reasons to put more work for keyboard user (it is not a selling point in most cases).

The main advantage of a TUI is that it forces to write the UI in a certain way, so you get the result automatically.

> It turns out that if you never change the UI and every menu item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how fast you can physically push the buttons.

Oh, I’ve been a new hire at places like this.

The day1 stuff in the system will be logically or coherently placed (e.g. alphabetically) and then the rest will be incrementally added on top.

The menu options will go like this:

1. Alpha

2. Bravo

3. Charlie

4. Turbo-Bravo

5. Charlie-Undo

6. AAAlpha

Great for day1 users that are still there and started with just 3 options but new users are screwed. The arrangement started to stop making sense circa 1995.

I’ve seen the same thing where parts shelves were sorted by manufacturer (to make re-ordering by manufacturer simple).

When they moved to automatic inventory, shelves didn’t matter anymore and if a part was made by manu1 but now manu2, they’d keep putting it with manu1 because “that’s where everyone’s gone to look for it for the part 20 years”.

All you had to know was who made that part in 2003 when auto-inventory stopped forcing them to be consistent by manufacturer to know which shelf to pick from. Easy!

New hires get screwed and over time nothing makes sense anymore.

> Once you learn that you can pop into a quick order menu with this specific sequence of five keys, you just automatically open the right menu the moment a customer walks up. No thought, just pure reflex.

This works because you can 'buffer inputs' as the gaming crowd says. You can hit the keys and the computer reads them one at a time and does what you asked at its pace. Often these kinds of systems do run faster than the input, but when they don't, it still works.

It's hard to do that with a GUI, you usually can't click (or tap) the button before it shows up and expect it to work... and when it does work like that, it's often undesirable.

Similar story.

I worked for a medium sized company who did work with Toro. We supplied many of their lubricants and they had TUI they still used on one of their machines to enter the orders from our company. It was the last of their legacy products, but worked incredibly well. We had very little issues ever with the system. Our Oracle ERP Net Suite? Had three people dedicated to making sure it ran smoothly. I still remember some of the guys I used to talk to at Toro were "lifers" who were always talking about how easier things were before all the SAAS and ERP software came on the scene.

The stories they had were pretty entertaining.

This times 1000x. I dream of an alternate path we could have taken where TUI and keyboard input was the default and all the fancy GUI stuff was put to good use where it's needed. In retrospect it's ludicrous that we have to use a pixel-perfect pointing device to amble slowly over to whereever the designers put their menus/toolbars/icons, context menus. Select from a list? I have like 50 keys that could do the job!

I worked at a big-box retailer before figuring out a career. They had an old-school TUI that was incredibly fast and well designed. Function keys to do all kinds of lookups and adjustments, advanced menus when you needed them, overall just a well designed system. People took a week or so to get the hang of it but then the skill ceiling was insane, people could get fast.

A few months before I left they switched to a "modern" GUI. It was shockingly bad. The speed of every transaction lowered. Even with optimal use it just took longer. So much time wasted.

When Lowes made the shift off their in-house TUI point-of-sale to a GUI I heard a lot of fallout from the hardcore TUI users losing their keyboard menuing. Stores and people would build their own “cheat sheets” to fly around the system and it became almost a second language to get to know the TUI.

Knowing that 1.5.6 sends you to scheduling a pickup, or 11.1 to get into the credit card application, versus hunting through graphical hell with a mouse and a touchscreen.

Maybe because there are other usages than business data entry and programming? I don’t think I’d be more productive when say editing pictures/movies or producing music with a text interface. Maybe it’s because I grew up with classic Mac OS but computers were not only about productivity, they were a place, and UX peaked with Spatial Finder. Nowadays I spend my working days mostly in text mode and I feel like I’ve lost something.

> It is named after one of its developers, Dick Pick

Wikipedia vandals these days...