Text mode is a computer display mode in which content is internally represented on a computer screen in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a character set; at the same time, contrasted to graphics mode or other kinds of computer graphics modes. Text mode applications communicate with the user by using command-line interfaces and text user interfaces. Many character sets used in text mode applications also contain a limited set of predefined semi-graphical characters usable for drawing boxes and other rudimentary graphics, which can be used to highlight the content or to simulate widget or control interface objects found in GUI programs. A typical example is the IBM code page 437 character set. An important characteristic of text mode programs is that they assume monospaced fonts, where every character has the same width on screen, which allows them to easily maintain the vertical alignment when displaying semi-graphical characters. This was an analogy of early mechanical printers which had fixed pitch. This way, the output seen on the screen could be sent directly to the printer maintaining the same format. Depending on the environment, the screen buffer can be directly addressable. Programs that display output on remote video terminals must issue special control sequences to manipulate the screen buffer. The most popular standards for such control sequences are ANSI and VT100. Programs accessing the screen buffer through control sequences may lose synchronization with the actual display so that many text mode programs have a redisplay everything command, often associated with the Ctrl+L key combination.
History Text mode video rendering came to prominence in the early 1970s, when video-oriented text terminals started to replace teleprinters in the interactive use of computers.
Benefits
The advantages of text modes as compared to graphics modes include lower memory consumption and faster screen manipulation. At the time text terminals were beginning to replace teleprinters in the 1970s, the extremely high cost of random-access memory in that period made it exorbitantly expensive to install enough memory for a computer to simultaneously store the current value of every pixel on a screen, to form what would now be called a framebuffer. Early framebuffers were standalone devices which cost tens of thousands of dollars, in addition to the expense of the advanced high-resolution displays to which they were connected. For applications that required simple line graphics but for which the expense of a framebuffer could not be justified, vector displays were a popular workaround. But there were many computer applications (e.g., data entry into a database) for which all that was required was the ability to render ordinary text in a quick and cost-effective fashion to a cathode-ray tube. Text mode avoids the problem of expensive memory by having dedicated display hardware re-render each line of text from characters into pixels with each scan of the screen by the cathode ray. In turn, the display hardware needs only enough memory to store the pixels equivalent to one line of text (or even less) at a time. Thus, the computer's screen buffer only stores and knows about the underlying text characters (hence the name "text mode") and the only location where the actual pixels representing those characters exist as a single unified image is the screen itself, as viewed by the user (thanks to the phenomenon of persistence of vision). For example, a screen buffer sufficient to hold a standard grid of 80 by 25 characters requires at least 2,000 bytes. Assuming a monochrome display, 8 bits per byte, and a standard size of 8 times 8 bits for each character, a framebuffer large enough to hold every pixel on the resulting screen would require at least 128,000 bits, 16,000 bytes, or just under 16 kilobytes. By the standards of modern computers, these may seem like trivial amounts of memory, but to put them in context, the original Apple II was released in 1977 with only four kilobytes of memory and a price of $1,300 in U.S. dollars (at a time when the minimum wage in the United States was only $2.30 per hour). Furthermore, from a business perspective, the business case for text terminals made no sense unless they could be produced and operated more cheaply than the paper-hungry teleprinters they were supposed to replace. Another advantage of text mode is that it has relatively low bandwidth requirements in remote terminal use. Thus, a text mode remote terminal can necessarily update the screen much faster than a graphics mode remote terminal linked to the same amount of bandwidth (and in turn will seem more responsive), since the remote server may only need to transmit a few dozen bytes for each screen update in text mode, as opposed to complex raster graphics remote procedure calls that may require the transmission and rendering of entire bitmaps.
User-defined characters The border between text mode and graphical programs can sometimes be fuzzy, especially on the PC's VGA hardware, because many later text mode programs tried to push the model to the extreme by playing with the video controller. For example, they redefined the character set in order to create custom semi-graphical characters, or even created the appearance of a graphical mouse pointer by redefining the appearance of the characters over which the mouse pointer was shown at a given time. Text mode rendering with user-defined characters has also been useful for 2D computer and video games because the game screen can be manipulated much faster than with pixel-oriented rendering.
Technical basis
A video controller implementing a text mode usually uses two distinct areas of memory. Character memory or a pattern table contains a raster font in use, where each character is represented by a dot matrix (a matrix of bits), so the character memory could be considered as a three-dimensional bit array. Display matrix (a text buffer, screen buffer, or nametable) tracks which character is in each cell. In the simple case, the display matrix can be just a matrix of code points (so named character pointer table), but it usually stores for each character position not only a code, but also attributes.
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