I don't think SmallTalk ever had a TUI. Even the very early versions on the Xerox machines used a GUI, and that GUI persisted even when it was all ported to Solaris.
Oberon was this weird mix where you had a proper GUI on thr screen but it would basically only show text. You could run commands by selecting text from inside any arbitrary window. The plan9 OS and Acme editor have kept this workflow.
The title of the article doesn't mention TUIs (or UIs at all) but I was thinking of a GUI. Specifically it seems I was likely thinking of Pharo (which is '00s not '90s so off by a decade).
The article subtitle is: "A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's".
The second paragraph says: "This time around, I want to look at the pure text-based IDEs that we had in that era before Windows eclipsed the PC industry."
