# TUI, Part 1 SDF's vibrant retro community has inspired me to "go terminal". I didn't built up a collection over the decades-- no BeBoxes, NeXTcubes, DEC Alphas, or SGI IRISes lying around. And it pains me to type this, but I won't be building up a collection, either. So, what to do? I'm settling for the next best thing: TUIs. Or, "do everything on the console or in a terminal session." If you're wondering what a TUI is, it's a text user interface. Nothing but ASCII characters for the most part. This was my home computer experience up until 1995 or so, when my family purchased a computer capable of running Windows, Netscape Navigator, and the infant world wide web. As the user experience continues to evolve, my teeth are grinding harder. As I was learning about software systems, software bloat became easier to spot. Most web sites have too large a footprint, take too much compute power to operate, and therefore introduce user experience latencies. As we spend more time using computers-- this includes smartphones, smart devices/things, kiosks (modern soda machines!), and the like-- the seconds, minutes, and hours spent waiting add up. CPUs doing unnecessary computations mean longer wait times for humans. "I've had enough" of generally-accepted laziness in modern software development. So, retro, TUI computing for me is both professional protest and nostalgia, roughly 50/50. Future posts in this series will go over the modern/bloated software that I use and its TUI/minimalist replacement(s). Stay tuned! It'll be fun, I promise! - thac0, 2023-07-06 => ../../index.gmi Top-level ## Attribution Copyright (C) 2023 Joseph B. Konno <thac0@tx0.org> This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. => ../LICENSE.gmi CC-BY-4.0 (my copy of official plaintext) => http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ CC-BY-4.0 (official)