Text-Based User Interfaces

+FarmerPotato · September 14

Since the 4A and Geneve are mainly keyboard-driven, I started wondering: how much potential is overlooked in character-based user interface? What innovations can you imagine, if WIMP had not taken over the world? (though I love a bitmapped display..)

I'm thinking of DM1000, Midnight Commander-style pickers. Tag-items-with-letters-then-execute. I'm NOT thinking about command-line, shell, DOS command prompt.

As part of Presentation Manager, IBM standardized CUI and GUI for each operation. That meant that keyboard entry was always an option, and power users always had shortcut keys, while the GUI would be familiar to anyone.

Here's a website that bets on text. What do you think?

Thymer

"An IDE for your TODO.txt file".

Blog: https://80daystartup.com/day-32/text-based-user-interfaces-in-2022/

Product Website: https://thymer.com

IDE

I guess IDE might be generally understood as a workflow environment - complex things done in steps with automation.

Thinking of DM1000 as an IDE for files 🙂

WordStar

Nostalgia - on CP/M - I remember that besides all the ctrl-key letter combos, you could type "." in column 1 to begin a formatting command like ".LM 10" for left margin.

Then the dot command would be hidden and you'd see the text formatted. I tried to learn about the history of dot formatting commands. TI Writer inherited them from Software Tools in Pascal, but Kernighan wrote that in a Unix-Runoff shop and they got it from something else.

I also think about TI-Writer, Markdown, TeX. Not so much TeX except to laugh at the macro \mathunderline.

jbdigriz · September 14

RUNOFF originated as a typesetting program for CTSS (on an IBM 7094). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF

DF-SHOW is an open source text-oriented file manager derived from Larry Kroeker's DF-EDIT, in turn derived from 990 DFM. DFEDIT was similar to XTREE, descendents, and other DOS or unix file managers, such as MC. The exact provenance of DFM I'm still digging into, or at least the relationship between Kroeker, TI, and ISSS. https://dfshow.org

The DF-SHOW source is available if someone wanted to port and expand on it.

Yeah, you excluded DOS-like shells for the expanded 4A that work over a serial console. Likely, though, all of this is also now doable using the capabilities of modern augmented /4A consoles alone. What about things like Funnelweb as an IDE platform? That's what I always considered it.

Maybe I'm just not catching your drift here however.

Edited September 14 by jbdigriz

+jedimatt42 · September 15

Goto YouTube and search for VIM or nVim, and you will see character UI evolved.

There seems to be a resurgence of this in Linux, maybe in retaliation to how heavy web-ui solutions have become.

Here is another very evolved character interface: https://k9scli.io (screenshots on the landing page)

ForceCommand was going to be not command line at first, and then I decided I just needed to be able to test each of this disk i/o routines (the stuff) before getting bogged down in pretty interface (the fluff) as a developer. I still aspire to build a pretty and fluffy interface over top, inspired by DirOpus4 or midnight commander (those both were of course borrowing heavily from predecessors)