Text mode in the context of Code page 437

Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics (still images, animations or video) still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.

Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms at the time, including CP/M (not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities). The number of interactive fiction works is increasing steadily as new ones are produced by an online community, using freely available development systems .

The Linux console is a system console internal to the Linux kernel. A system console is the device which receives all kernel messages and warnings and which allows logins in single user mode. The Linux console provides a way for the kernel and other processes to send text output to the user, and to receive text input from the user. The user typically enters text with a computer keyboard and reads the output text on a computer monitor. The Linux kernel supports virtual consoles – consoles that are logically separate, but which access the same physical keyboard and display. The Linux console (and Linux virtual consoles) are implemented by the VT (virtual terminal) subsystem of the Linux kernel, and do not rely on any user space software. This is in contrast to a terminal emulator, which is a user space process that emulates a terminal, and is typically used in a graphical display environment.

The Linux console was one of the first features of the kernel and was originally written by Linus Torvalds in 1991 (see history of Linux). There are two main implementations: framebuffer and text mode. The framebuffer implementation is the default in modern Linux distributions, and together with kernel mode setting, provides kernel-level support for display hardware and features such as showing graphics while the system is booting. The legacy text mode implementation was used in PC-compatible systems with CGA, EGA, MDA and VGA graphics cards. Non-x86 architectures used framebuffer mode because their graphics cards did not implement text mode. The Linux console uses fixed-size bitmap, monospace fonts, usually defaulting to 8x16 pixels per character.

A font editor is a class of application software specifically designed to create or modify font files. Font editors differ greatly depending on if they are designed to edit bitmap fonts or outline fonts. Most modern font editors deal with the outline fonts. Bitmap fonts uses an older technology and are most commonly used in console applications. The bitmap font editors were usually very specialized, as each computing platform had its own font format. One subcategory of bitmap fonts is text mode fonts.