GUI: TUI and Xerox

Text-based user interface

We can choose to make the command-line interface more user-friendly, by giving a hint to the user about available commands. This is done in the text-based user interface (TUI).

The TUI uses box-drawing characters along with alphanumeric symbols and special characters. The box-drawing characters display the graphic primitives—lines, rectangles, triangles, etc.—on the screen. Primitives guide the user through the available actions they can take with the application.

The figure below shows a typical text-based user interface. There is an output of system resource usage by the htop program.