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There are standards on text interfaces? Or do you mean using the IBM Extended ASCII set for lines and stuff, cause that wasn't Microsoft's invention.

There are some pretty nifty things you can do in text mode; including (but not limited to) drawing graphics mode-style mouse cursors, drawing lines, etc... And all of that without even touching the 512 character set.

I'm designing a menu-based UI (text), so does that qualify as a TUI?

I find that with an intuitive text interface, alot more can actually be accomplished in a shorter amount of time, especially once shortcuts are memorized and such. A GUI is great for a whole host of things as well... you can't really make a nice photoshopped/gimp'd image in a TUI. =)

01000101 wrote:I'm designing a menu-based UI (text), so does that qualify as a TUI?

Sure, that counts.

I find that with an intuitive text interface, alot more can actually be accomplished in a shorter amount of time, especially once shortcuts are memorized and such.

[propaganda="CLI"]Isn't that the point of batch files/shell scripting?[/propaganda]

you can't really make a nice photoshopped/gimp'd image in a TUI. =)

That's true!

paxcoder wrote:I know this might sound awful, but learn from Microsoft. It's the king in the field (Txt UI's), and it practically defined the standards (how things should look, what chars are used for what objects etc).

I disagree. Borland's menu-driven TUI, Turbo Vision, was widely used, and set more of a standard than MS did. Although there's only so many things you can do in text mode of course, so naturally all the 'widgets' look similar on both systems.


JAL

jal wrote:

paxcoder wrote:I know this might sound awful, but learn from Microsoft. It's the king in the field (Txt UI's), and it practically defined the standards (how things should look, what chars are used for what objects etc).

I disagree. Borland's menu-driven TUI, Turbo Vision, was widely used, and set more of a standard than MS did.

Perhaps. I'm just speaking my mind. I found MS' thing easier (more like a GUI).

paxcoder wrote:I'm just speaking my mind. I found MS' thing easier (more like a GUI).

Borland's Turbo Vision was far more like a Window-driven GUI as we know it than the MS stuff. I used Quick Basic and QBasic extensively, and could never get used to the split-screen stuff, while Turbo/Borland Pascal and Turbo Debugger, which I've also used extensively, had a far more intuitive, windowed system.


JAL

jal wrote:I used Quick Basic and QBasic extensively

At the sime time? they're one and the same.

Actually, QBasic was QuickBASIC with no compiler, just the interpreter.

Ah, I had no idea. I think you're right though, I don't remember seing any compilers in the QBasic directory, back when I was 7 years old (then again, it's been a long time and I had no clue what a compiler actually was). Nor on the Windows 95 CD-ROM.

Love4Boobies wrote:

jal wrote:I used Quick Basic and QBasic extensively

At the sime time? :D they're one and the same.

Quick Basic has a long history, I used versions 1.x, 2.x and 4.5 (I only recall the exact version numberof the last one). When MS-DOS released DOS 6.x, instead of the good old GWBASIC, they included a stripped down, interpreter-only version of Quick Basic (which was a true compiler), and called it QBasic. The older Quick Basic version were just GWBASIC compilers with a text editor, although you could do without line numbers. Quick Basic 4.5, like QBasic, was a fully procedural language.


JAL

jal wrote:

paxcoder wrote:I know this might sound awful, but learn from Microsoft. It's the king in the field (Txt UI's), and it practically defined the standards (how things should look, what chars are used for what objects etc).

I disagree. Borland's menu-driven TUI, Turbo Vision, was widely used, and set more of a standard than MS did. Although there's only so many things you can do in text mode of course, so naturally all the 'widgets' look similar on both systems.

Well I yet again disagree with you. While QuickBasic menus were easy to navigate, all those windows and arrows on Borland - they were confusing. Oh and the help on QuickBasic was also brilliant.

Holy war approaching, call in the pope!

paxcoder wrote:Well I yet again disagree with you. While QuickBasic menus were easy to navigate, all those windows and arrows on Borland - they were confusing. Oh and the help on QuickBasic was also brilliant.

These arrows however quite nicely reflected the arrows used in Windows 3.11, and reflect the minimze/maximize buttons of current versions. The help in QuickBasic was far from brilliant, with quite some examples wrong, and like I said the split screen was very annoying.


JAL

jal wrote:

paxcoder wrote:Well I yet again disagree with you. While QuickBasic menus were easy to navigate, all those windows and arrows on Borland - they were confusing. Oh and the help on QuickBasic was also brilliant.

These arrows however quite nicely reflected the arrows used in Windows 3.11, and reflect the minimze/maximize buttons of current versions. The help in QuickBasic was far from brilliant, with quite some examples wrong, and like I said the split screen was very annoying.

First of all, split screen could be resized, and windows could be "maximized" by double clicking i think. besides, we were hardly talking about split screens. those we are talking about can be described as that "split screen" in ides that can show you code in one window, and compiler output in the lower one. and arrows - i was talking about maximize (i think it did that) arrow, not sliders. besides, your example is more suitable as desktop thing, i was instead referring to the menu system (alt and then fall down lists, or click and same), so yeah... there's no need to argue