Talk:Text-based user interface

Fair use rationale for Image:Phoenix - AwardBIOS CMOS Setup Utility.jpg

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BetacommandBot (talk) 00:52, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:MSDOS Edit.png

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Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

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BetacommandBot (talk) 13:40, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

3270 and vt100

Shouldn't this article have some information on text only interfaces from the mainframe era? (unsigned comment by 12.155.35.130)

probably (someone should collect material for it) Tedickey (talk) 16:33, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Regenerating glyphs

Some discussion (with WP:RS) is needed to distinguish that from XOR'ing, which is a long-established graphics technique TEDickey (talk) 08:11, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Hello, please explain how you would use this long-established XOR graphics technique on a textmode buffer to produce a pixel-precise mouse cursor. I'd really like to learn it.

Fwiw, i do remember reading an e-mail from Jeffrey Lim (author of Impulse Tracker) back in 1996 or 97, in which he described how difficult it was to get 80x50 textmode to do all these fancy effects. "Not nice to have to do" in his words, actually. Delt01 03:28, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't see a WP:RS in the comments above. The textmode in this case had direct access to the memory used for the video display, and could use whatever technique the developer had in mind TEDickey (talk) 11:07, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Can you please rephrase more clearly, and/or give examples of what you mean by "whatever technique"? Also sorry, i don't know what a "WP:RS" is. Delt01 20:16, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

WP:RS is explained in the topic at the link. By the way, 80x50 doesn't appear to be what your picture is using (there are items not on a regular character grid). More likely, it's using one of the graphics modes with similar resolution. TEDickey (talk) 20:52, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

For what it's worth, if I'd written the code you're alluding to, I'd have used a Colour look-up table, to translate the colors. There's not enough information in the picture shown to see how large the color palette is, but the picture doesn't show a large usage. TEDickey (talk) 21:03, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

> WP:RS is explained in the topic at the link.

Thanks, understood++ (and --motivation to add further contribs. thx a lot) - please stop marking contributions from other users as "dubious" just because you feel like it.

> By the way, 80x50 doesn't appear to be what your picture is using

uh... need full 640x400 ((80 * 8) by (50 * 8)) screenshot maybe? (Just run the music/audio sequencing program "Impulse Tracker" under DOSBOX emulator. I can personally guarantee that the on-screen results are the same as they were 15-20 years ago on actual msdos+vga hardware.)

> (there are items not on a regular character grid)

DUH, take a wild guess why, back in those days, we went to such extents at coding these VGA hacks...? (here, "items" being the mouse cursor - unless you see other items which aren't physically possible to render in 80x50 textmode?)

> I'd have used a Colour look-up table, to translate the colors.

To clarify: Textmode vga used a color "depth" AKA bits per pixel (or, in this case bits per CHARACTER or "CELL") of 2 bytes: asciicharacter=8bits, foregroundcolor=4bits, backgroundcolor=3bits, attributes=1bit - with the actual colormap (or look-up table) being written to the graphics card's registers. (8000+buffer_offset, anyone?) That's 2 bytes (16 bits) PER CHARACTER (or "cell" - of which there are 80x50 of) = 4000*2 = 8000 ...Colors are then selected for each character's foreground (from 16 colors) and background (from 8 colors, attr.bit=see below) ON THE ACTUAL SCREEN BUFFER - now, add to this the registers for redefining each character's bitmap (bitmaps are 1bpp, ie. 2kb for a 8x8 font of 256 characters, 4kb for a 16x8 font - as used by DOS "mode con/codepage" etc) AND the possibility of using a whole EXTRA FONT (SET of 256 characters) (bug me for specs || should be up soon) == full 16 colors for foreground, and 8 colors for background -- swapping 1 attribute bit for toggling between normal (0) and secondary (1) fonts. Impulse Tracker uses 9 characters (3 by 3 "cells") of the primary font continually swapping for its mouse cursor, and very often the whole "secondary" font (256 characters of 8x8) for extra stuff such as half-characters (4x8 font) seen in pattern view and infopage, graphic rendering of samples on sample list, vol/panning/filter envelopes on instrument view, etc.

/* sry for several edits in a row.... zZzZ tired (chronic fatigue syndrome) */

/* "sign your posts" (this supposedly appends my name/accountinfo/etc. to this edit? zZzZ exhausted..... ) sorry for being "wikilliterate" :3 */ Delt01 04:27, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

hmm - in the first part of the discussion, you are citing another person as the author of the program, and in the current response you appear to be asserting authorship. Bear in mind that talkpage comments aren't WP:RS. TEDickey (talk) 11:39, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

The author of Impulse Tracker is an Australian named Jeffrey Lim, aka "pulse". However, back in those days i had also programmed a textmode interface under DOS similar to that of Impulse Tracker - including a per-pixel mouse cursor using the same "regenerating glyphs" technique. It was used in various DOS based projects when i was in college. Hope that clarifies... Delt01 03:52, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

The technique as described by Delt01 is correct. Another well-known example of glyph editing to create graphics in text mode was MegaZeux, a text-mode game engine. http://www.digitalmzx.net/wiki/index.php?title=Character_set mentions loading partial character sets into the glyph tables during run-time to change the graphics on-screen. Ralf Brown's Interrupt List may be a reliable source concerning the technical info regarding interrupts, positioning, and structure of the glyphs. 24.218.20.87 (talk) 18:21, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I'd like to close the debate about the dubiousness of this image. It's very clear that's text mode because the mouse pointer is forced to use the same colors of the characters over which it is drawn and it's also very clear that the text glyphs used to display the pointer are generated in real time since the VGA and VGA-compatible cards could only keep 256 or 512 glyphs in memory at most and the image shows background characters (the horizontal line) sharing the same glyphs with the pointer. It's also very clearly not a case of using XOR in graphics mode because the upper and bottom parts of the pointer have different colors despite the background being identical. So I've removed the "dubious" tag from the caption, please don't add it back: the image caption is very accurate as it is. 93.97.16.78 (talk) 14:17, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

"Facts" on Wikipedia are established by WP:RS, rather than by unsupported claims. TEDickey (talk) 14:41, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

I already pointed out that it was questionable that it's text mode, since the characters on the right side of the image are not on the same grid-alignment as those to the left. The various modes have text- and graphics-resolutions providing roughly the same appearance, given suitable character-rendering in the latter. The editor pushing for the dubious interpretation has already commented that none of the development of this feature was done by him/herself, and that we're seeing second-hand comments throughout. TEDickey (talk) 14:47, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Tedickey, my facts are verifiable by looking at the image, please read again what I wrote. All the characters in the image are perfectly aligned. They all are 8x8 pixel characters (probably from a 80x50 characters text mode with a resolution of 640x400 pixels). The image on Wikipedia has been zoomed x2, so the characters end up being 16x16 pixel wide. If it can make easier to see that all chars are neatly aligned, I've superimposed a square grid to the image, you can see the result at: http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/910/itmouse2.png I'll remove the "dubious" tag, if the problem is the lack of sources feel free to add a "citation needed" tag, but please stop re-adding the dubious tag unless you have an alternative explanation for why the mouse pointer follows the colors of the characters under it. 93.97.16.78 (talk) 16:01, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

I see (a few questionable aspects about the image, but expect that you'll simply revert to crediting it to "regenerating glyphs", which makes further discussion pointless). The term by the way caught my attention because it's rarely used. TEDickey (talk) 16:44, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

> It's very clear that's text mode because the mouse pointer is forced to use the same colors of

> the characters [ ... ] are generated in real time since

and

> Tedickey, my facts are verifiable by looking at the image, please read again what I wrote.

THANK YOU. This is what i've been trying to explain all along. Delt01 05:33, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

The caption says "Mouse cursor in Impulse Tracker. A more precise cursor (per-pixel resolution) was achieved by regenerating the glyphs of characters used where the cursor was visible, at each mouse movement in real-time." That's several claims. The picture shows a snapshot which can be explained in more than one way, and there's no WP:RS offered to support any of those claims. My point is that talk-page comments (in particular, from anonymous editors claiming extensive expertise) are not WP:RS. What you need is for instance a third-party review (again, not anonymous) which comments on the behavior. TEDickey (talk) 11:29, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Alternatively, you could remove the claims, leaving it as an example of a text-mode application TEDickey (talk) 11:32, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

For what it's worth, another example of the technique, not from IT, but attempting to emulate it: http://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=167 I'm not claiming 'extensive expertise'. Just saying that it was a technique that was used in software of the time, there are examples other than IT, and there is technical documentation of it. It's not dubious, in fact it's almost certain that IT used that technique. The alternative explanation (XORing) just doesn't fit. You could not achieve that image in text-mode by XORing characters. 24.218.20.87 (talk) 08:06, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Look above - I did mention color maps. I don't recall a previous pointer to IT's technical documentation describing the feature. TEDickey (talk) 02:06, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

File:Itmouse.png Nominated for speedy Deletion

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Operating systems without full-screen text mode

Full screen text mode is not available in Windows 7. I've been unable to find any information as to why it was removed, or whether it was present in Vista. If anyone knows, that could be worth mentioning in the TUI Under MS-DOS and Windows section. 24.218.20.87 (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

IIRC, text mode was a touted feature of a Windows Server 6.1 (2008 R2?). SvartMan (talk) 13:48, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Full-screen mode in cmd.exe is not supported in Windows Vista and later (although there are some workarounds which are not officially supported). I don't know about servers since I don't work with Windows servers. This should be mentioned somewhere in the article 71.199.54.157 (talk) 03:56, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Terminology problem in introductory sentence

…which goes (shortened here): "Text-based user interface was coined after the invention of graphical user interfaces, to distinguish them from text-based user interfaces." So we have "text-based user interface" to be distinguished from "text-based user interface". Looking through the history of this article, it originally was "text user interface" to be distinguished from "text-based user interface" (which was already weak because confusing).
'seems to me that what we are talking about here is the distinction between full screen and line mode (of a text-only display), as already indicated previously in this talk page. --Jerome Potts (talk) 02:40, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Other readers would ignore the nonsensical interpretation and read the sentence as distinguishing GUIs from TUIs. TEDickey (talk) 08:48, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Processes?

Re: [1]

I thought that the generic terms were programs and scripts. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:27, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Agreed Guy, "process" has a technical meaning. It's better than "app", but program is better yet. Go ahead and fix it. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 20:51, 9 July 2020 (UTC)