Text User Interface

Text-based user interface (TUI), also called textual user interface or terminal user interface, is a retronym coined sometime after the invention of graphical user interfaces. TUIs display computer graphics in text mode. An advanced TUI may, like GUIs, use the entire screen area and accept mouse and other inputs.

From text application's point of view, a text screen (and communications with it) can belong to one of three types (here ordered in order of decreasing accessibility):

Under Linux and other Unix-like systems, a program easily accommodates to any of the three cases because the same interface (namely, standard streams) controls the display and keyboard. Also, specialized programming libraries help to output the text in a way appropriate to the given display device and interface to it. See below for a comparison to Windows.

American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard ANSI X3.64 defines a standard set of escape sequences that can be used to drive terminals to create TUIs (see ANSI escape code). Escape sequences may be supported for all three cases mentioned in the above section, allowing random cursor movements and color changes. However, not all terminals follow this standard, and many non-compatible but functionally equivalent sequences exist.

On IBM Personal Computers and compatibles, the Basic Input Output System (BIOS) and DOS system calls provide a way to write text on the screen, and the ANSI.SYS driver could process standard ANSI escape sequences. However, programmers soon learned that writing data directly to the screen buffer was far faster and simpler to program, and less error-prone; see VGA-compatible text mode for details. This change in programming methods resulted in many DOS TUI programs. The win32 console environment is notorious for its emulation of certain EGA/VGA text mode features, particularly a random access to the text buffer, even if the application runs in a window. On the other hand, programs running under Windows (both native and DOS applications) have much less control of the display and keyboard than Linux and DOS programs can have, because of aforementioned win32 console layer.

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