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GUI - graphical user interface, like a windowed program.
Non-gui, lacking a window, like running a command in a terminal (or command prompt).
In a nutshell, there are three types of program interfaces. CLI, TUI, and GUI. GUI means it is graphical, buttons, menus, that sort of thing. CLI and TUI both rely the terminal (they are “non-GUI” I guess), where CLI means command line interface, things like “cd” or “tar” would fit into this. TUI means terminal user interface, and they usually involve keyboard navigation, but you still have menus and such. A good example I use a lot is rmpc, a neat music player! There are some TUI programs that also support mouse input, like aforementioned rmpc, but it’s not the focus.
TLDR: GUIs have buttons you click with a mouse, TUIs have menus that can be navigated via a keyboard, CLIs mean you type commands into the terminal.
TUI. Text User Interface. Command line. Terminal. You interact with the application via the keyboard, rather than a mouse, touchscreen, trackpad, etc.
There’s also voice user interfaces! I’m not sure if it goes by another name, but blind people have their own way of using a phone, plus there’s a lot of voice control when driving or using Alexa and the like
Just of note, TUI stands for terminal user interface, not text!
Can literally everything be tui ?
No but many things can be. There’s also a distinction between a CLI (command line interface, just running programs in a terminal) and TUIs (terminal user interface); like stuff built using ncurses which is a popular TUI library.
Things that need graphics don’t work well as a TUI. For example, it would be pretty hard to make a 3d modelling application like Blender make sense in a terminal…
Someone wrote a terminal that can render a 3d model of a cat as the cursor and rotate the contents of windows
there’s OpenSCAD which uses a whonky scripting/programing language to build 3d models. You can do quite a bit in it, if know what you’re doing- and the neat part is that the files are text filesso they don’t take a lot of space.
I agree, the neat part is that the files.
Sorry, they’re text files. It’s a custom whonky language that gets complied/rendered
Yup. though a lot of things are more effecient and easily understood with GUIs than command line interfaces. Imagine a volume slider. on the other hand there’s a lot of things that are much more convenient in a terminal window.
sure. you can use
amixer sset Master 50%to set volume to 50%, but it’s faster and more intuitive to use the GUI for it.
GUI:
vs CLI:
but it’s faster and more intuitive to use the GUI for it.
As someone with a tremor in both hands: sliders are assholes!
And then there’s that.
It literally takes me a longer time to move my hand over to the pointer and slide the little arrow to the volume controls than it takes me to tap the terminal button and give a short command. Point is moot for me personally though, as volume always stays mute :D
The good thing is, a proper operating system just let’s you do what works for you. Obviously there is no one way that’s best for everyone.
As you said, that’s an example of a CLI, yet a TUI would be something different, e.g. like the non-graphical installer of your dear Linux distribution.
Yes technically. Practically some software would be objectively awful without a graphical interface, like image modification.
ImageMagick is amazing for command line image manipulation, but the use case is of course different. It’s great if you need to do the exact same operation to a bunch of pictures, such as rotating or rescaling.
Exactly. A TUI is not a replacement for a GUI where human interaction is essential to the process.
But, very few computer processes require direct human input. The overwhelming majority of individual operations are performed silently in the background. The presence of a TUI in an image modification program allows for certain operations to be performed automatically, in the background, without a human ever needing to be involved. I actually needed to do this, to add what was basically a watermark and a date stamp to a PDF document via an image modification program. Repeated 80-120 times a day, 6 days a week. A TUI allows for the tying together of a half dozen simple operations into a functional system.
Exactly. A TUI is not a replacement for a GUI where human interaction is essential to the process.
You’re thinking of a CLI, a TUI allows for human interaction.
Yes.
GUI - Graphical User Interface
“Non-gui” mean that the software does not have a GUI, this means that the softare uses text mode instead.
It means there are no graphical user interface. It does not mean that there are any other user interfaces, but it does not rule it out either.
Non gooey
“Made by Oracle”?
