Text-based user interface

set. The modern context of use is usually a terminal emulator.

Types of text terminals

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):

A genuine text mode display, controlled by a video adapter or the central processor itself. This is a normal condition for a locally running application on various types of personal computers and mobile devices. If not deterred by the operating system, a smart program may exploit the full power of a hardware text mode.
A text mode emulator.lities usually become reduced to a serial line or its emulation, possibly with few ioctl()s as an out-of-band channel in such cases as Telnet and Secure Shell. This is the worst case, because software restrictions hinder the use of capabilities of a remote display devi

Some notable programs of this kind were Microsoft Word, DOS Shell, WordPerfect, Norton Commander, Turbo Vision based Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C (the latter included the conio library), Lotus 1-2-3 and many others. Some of these interfaces survived even during the Microsoft Windows 3.1x period in the early 1990s. For example, the Microsoft C 6.0 compiler, used to write true GUI programs under 16-bit Windows, still has its own TUI.

Since its start, Microsoft Windows includes a console to display DOS software. Later versions added the Win32 console as a native interface for command-line interface and TUI programs. The console usually opens in window mode, but it can be switched to full, true text mode screen and vice versa by pressing the Alt and Enter keys together. Full-screen mode is not available in Windows Vista and later, but may be used with some workarounds.^[1]

[curses (programming library)|curses]] within the application. Custom TUI applications based on widgets can be easily developed using the dialog program (based on ncurses), or the Whiptail program (based on S-Lang).

In addition, the rise in popularity of Linux brought many former DOS users to a Unix-like platform, which has fostered a DOS influence in many TUIs. The program minicom, for example, is modeled after the popular DOS program Telix. Some other TUI programs, such as the Twin desktop, were ported over.

Most Unix-like operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) support virtual consoles, typically accessed through a Ctrl-Alt-F key combination. For example, under Linux up to 64 consoles may be accessed (12 via function keys), each displaying in full-screen text mode.

The free software program GNU Screen provides for managing multiple sessions inside a single TUI, and so can be thought of as being like a window manager for text-mode and command-line interfaces. Tmux can also do this.

Examples of programming libraries

References

^ cmd prompt full screen in Windows 7. Social.technet.microsoft.com. Retrieved on 2013-06-15.

[1] rompt full screen in Windows 7. Social.technet.microsoft.com. Retrieved on 2013-06-15.

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