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Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

Devil's advocate: There is one thing GUIs do better than TUIs: international text. Try to present on the same terminal screen text in Arabic and Japanese.

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Actual terminal-based TUIs sure, they have small character sets burned into ROM, sized for 50-years-ago prices.

Modern terminals, even the text-based console on a fresh minimal Arch linux install, is going to support Unicode probably without a ton of issues as long as you have a font installed that has the characters. The struggle then for RTL or non-Latin character sets and languages is making the UI fit the words in a way that makes sense.

Yes, you can spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to lay out multilingual text on a terminal, or just use Cairo or some toolkit and let solved problems stay solved.

Yes, I'm quite sure that's true in most cases.

FWIW, dBASE IV version 1.5 does support Japanese for date format. It's one of the options for 'SET DATE' command.

Isn't that just the order of the date components for I/O? It's still just ASCII characters.

Yes! I was just pointing it out to show that they had at least thought of Japanese users (in some small way).

But the past didn't use ASCII as such, but extended character sets, or multiple characters sets, which did allow for Russian, German, etc. text interfaces.

There is history frozen into printer manuals. One solution was control codes like DC1 to bank-switch the appearance of a block such as ASCII 128-159.

Just use gettext? The strings might vary in sizes, but when you are comfortable with the text resolution of the GUI, just set your Terminal to the same resolution and that problem is the same.

Not an issue with modern terminals and Unifont.

You are underestimating the complexity of laying out multilingual text.

Enough to read Japanese under Unicode. Arabic might be more difficult but a native might read it in a hurry at least.

And yet, as I read manuals from the 1970s-80s, I see a lot of money was made by minicomputer vendors whose operating systems were sold with multi-lingual character sets. Even Japanese.

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