From the pre-GUI era, one favorite would be Ken Thompson's text editor "ed". It's built with a print output in mind and it doesn't show you the text itself by default. You'd have to target a line range and specify an action such as replacement or even to print it out to screen or paper; using the now famous g/re/p pattern. The minimalism is really cool. ed is still around as a vital part of the vim text editor to this day actually.
That's not what is commonly meant by "TUI". But as you mentioned, these old UNIX tools were really meant to be used with output printed to paper, which formed part of their "user interface": With CRT terminals, they actually become less usable, since anything that scrolls off the screen gets lost (even today in a terminal window, there is usually a limit to how far you can scroll back).
And I feel like all those UNIX lovers going on and on about how efficient command line tools are don't get this at all. For a command like "replace 'foo' with 'bar' in lines 1237-1451" to make sense, you either need superhuman memory, or a printout nearby. And if you don't use it every day, you'll also need to look up the exact syntax for that command.
PCs running MS-DOS might have been less powerful than UNIX machines, but they got really good, discoverable text user interfaces that took advantage of the hardware available, and could access that hardware in the most direct way. The best that is available now on Linux are really just pale imitations, and have to go through layers of terminal libraries and ugly hacks, like connecting to the X server in order to get the state of modifier keys that the terminal doesn't send.
> you either need superhuman memory, or a printout nearby. And if you don't use it every day, you'll also need to look up the exact syntax for that command.
This is how I feel about emacs. Sure it contains the world, but you have to memorize the map to get anywhere interesting. I do like emacs and I do use it daily, but my command repertoire is under a dozen in number.
