More specifically, a TUI takes over your terminal and treats it as a window. Other examples are full screen editors like vim and emacs or a process monitor like top or htop.

Contrast with most terminal programs and shells that treat the terminal as a stream of text lines.

A TUI usually doesn't appear in your terminal scroll back.

It is a time travel to 1980's computer interfaces.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface

A great way to time travel in modern computers.

Text UI. It's apps made to be run in a terminal basically.

Text User Interface