[moregrist]

> But once you start adding mouse clickable tabs, buttons, checkboxes etc. you left the UX for TUIs behind and applied the UX expected for GUIs, it has become a GUI larping as a TUI.

Hard disagree. Borland TurboVision [0] was one of the greatest TUI toolkits of the DOS era, had all of these:

> Turbo Vision applications replicate the look and feel of these IDEs, including edit controls, list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and menus, all of which have built-in mouse support.

Well, I can’t remember if it had tabs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

[dathanb82]

Oh man, Turbo Pascal was my first "real" programming language -- it was all various flavors of BASIC before, and mostly toy projects. The developer experience with Turbo Pascal (by which I guess I mostly mean Turbo Vision) was honestly pretty great

[jksmith]

Vasellating. TurboVision was awesome, but it was pushing the boundary of TUI, which in my mind was great for moving hard copy to computer entered use case. To wit, hard copy on your right side, you transfer data to app without looking at screen, but just looking at hard copy, remembering when/where to hit return key, maybe tab for prior field, stuff like that.

But hey, if the screen is drawn 24 x 80 with extended ascii, it's TUI. And man, loved the "absolute" keyword in turbo pascal. Instant screen writes when writing to a 2 dimensional array.

[weinzierl]

I don't remember "absolute" but I sure do remember "gotoxy" and it rhymes with boxy, yeah, you won't convince me otherwise.

[jksmith]

It was something like screen: array[1..80,1..25] of byte absolute $B800:0000; So, just use all the extended ascii to assign chars to cells to draw boxes for screens, buttons, tables, whatever. Instant update.