[ColonelPhantom]

But what _is_ a "Text User Interface"? Google Images just returns what is being discussed here: "GUIs" that run in some kind of text mode. And to me, that's also what a TUI is.

A more textually oriented environment (like a normal Unix shell) is, in my experience, usually referred to as a CLI: Command Line Interface.

I did find an interesting hybrid in the Pi coding agent: it seems to leverage the normal terminal scrollback, while still enhancing it with things like transient input fields and status lines, so that it can display those without cluttering scrollback.

[bitwize]

That's pretty much the distinction. A CLI is stream-oriented, may accept user input from standard in and/or write to standard out with buffered I/O; a TUI is full-screen, interactive (responds immediately to keystrokes), and uses text characters to represent visual elements.

[MBCook]

And that’s where my comment came in.

I see TUI as a more general term: a program based in a terminal.

In my mind it does not imply it has to be an ASCII GUI style thing and not just a stream oriented non-interactive program.