6 ms·

As late as 2011, we had a custom payroll system on MS-DOS. I was always blown away by the speed it's users achieved. They really flew through the menus and knew

As late as 2011, we had a custom payroll system on MS-DOS. I was always blown away by the speed it's users achieved. They really flew through the menus and knew all hotkeys and commands of the TUI by heart. When they got "upgraded" to a modern GUI based system, it really slowed them down. Of course learning a new thing always takes time, but that's not the whole story. Especially with ever-changing websites that usually don't care about hotkeys, the mental load of visually scanning for elements and clicking them with the mouse can be really slow. And it always fascinates me how it was perfectly normal and expected for mere users to use a TUI while today I've heard grunts even from junior devs and self-proclaimed power-users when I told them to use the CLI for this or that. How times have changed. IBM i is fascinating, and in a world of ever-changing tech-stacks I sometimes yearn for a stable environment where you don't have to fight with 10,000 node.js dependencies every other month just to keep that payroll website going. I've never came in contact with IBM i or POWER tech in a professional capacity, but have purchased an RS/6000 and, more recently, a TalosII system to play around with ppc64le :)

john61 4y ago
As a pianist I am not surprised. The keystrokes a TUI requires is like a piece of piano music. You can learn the required keystrokes pretty fast and play it very fast, reliable and unconscious. Image a piano played by touchscreen or mouse.
LeftHandPath 4y ago
I've noticed a lot of the more experienced people in our office stop trusting things as soon as they see drop shadows and branded color schemes. And they are all very quick with the old terminals.
- at_compile_time 4y ago
  My favorite are the gratuitous animations that the program is too bloated to render smoothly.
bombcar 4y ago
The biggest key with the "green screen" terminals is they would NEVER EVER lose a keypress and they would buffer them, too. So even if the computer was actually quite slow, if you knew what you were doing you could "type ahead" a few screens into the system, and then wander off and do something else. That just doesn't work on GUIs (some rarely are well designed so that it can) and certainly has zero chance of working on webpages.
- protomyth 4y ago
  I honestly wish someone had come up with some text markup language and "browser" so enterprise developers could deploy text UI apps. The web is just awful for the back office people. Frankly, I wonder how much money is being spent on the web when a TUI would have been more productive.
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    I like the idea of a Text UI markup language. It's envisage some kind of nested table describing the layout? More declarative?
    - worthless-trash 4y ago
      I -think- that it might be possible to do so something like ncurses forms.
  - p_l 4y ago
    That's literally how IBM block terminals operated, and it was AFAIK most visible with CICS which was designed around similar model to Web 1.0 apps - blocks of code ("transactions") in CICS would send a (possibly multipage) form to terminal, then when the terminal send back the response (usually just the filled in fields of the form) another transaction would get fired and perform processing on it, and so on and so on. Of course the screens had rudimentary markup to support this including client-side validation of sorts.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    I personally don't care about how it's implemented, markup or otherwise, I'd just be happy to see TUIs return in numbers for modern terminal emulators. SSH apps are slowly becoming a thing, thankfully, but not quickly enough for my liking.
ordiel 4y ago
Developers of newer versions of a system even if it is a migration from TUI to a Web GUI should really strive to maintain the shortcuts and hotkeys, an upgrade its suposed to be "that", extra functionality not a replacement of the existing one. Sadly there is this assumption that given it has a GUI there is no need of shortcuts or hotkeys, forcing users to use the mouse. Gmail does provide some hotkeys and I think even those "few" ones really help, also Atlassian applications yet most web pages I have interacted with have none
- fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
  Part of the problem here is that desktop development frameworks included keyboard shortcuts essentially for free: Mac associates them with menu items, emacs/vim's key -> command -> action design give an obvious place to implement shortcuts; Delphi and similar programs had similar places to automatically slot in keyboard shortcuts. Web frameworks focus on visuals and mouse interactivity and keyboard control is almost an afterthought (aside from some minimal attention to tab-order because of accessibility).
  - mook 4y ago
    Another part of the problem is that the contents of the browser is mostly untrusted, and the browser itself already has a giant pile of shortcut keys that would conflict.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Excel had Lotus-123 shortcut compatibility for decades after Lotus-123 was no longer a going concern. It's still somewhat in there with / triggering the menu on Windows Excel.

john61 4y ago

As a pianist I am not surprised. The keystrokes a TUI requires is like a piece of piano music. You can learn the required keystrokes pretty fast and play it very fast, reliable and unconscious. Image a piano played by touchscreen or mouse.

LeftHandPath 4y ago

I've noticed a lot of the more experienced people in our office stop trusting things as soon as they see drop shadows and branded color schemes. And they are all very quick with the old terminals.

at_compile_time 4y ago
My favorite are the gratuitous animations that the program is too bloated to render smoothly.

bombcar 4y ago

The biggest key with the "green screen" terminals is they would NEVER EVER lose a keypress and they would buffer them, too. So even if the computer was actually quite slow, if you knew what you were doing you could "type ahead" a few screens into the system, and then wander off and do something else. That just doesn't work on GUIs (some rarely are well designed so that it can) and certainly has zero chance of working on webpages.

protomyth 4y ago
I honestly wish someone had come up with some text markup language and "browser" so enterprise developers could deploy text UI apps. The web is just awful for the back office people. Frankly, I wonder how much money is being spent on the web when a TUI would have been more productive.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  I like the idea of a Text UI markup language. It's envisage some kind of nested table describing the layout? More declarative?
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    I -think- that it might be possible to do so something like ncurses forms.
- p_l 4y ago
  That's literally how IBM block terminals operated, and it was AFAIK most visible with CICS which was designed around similar model to Web 1.0 apps - blocks of code ("transactions") in CICS would send a (possibly multipage) form to terminal, then when the terminal send back the response (usually just the filled in fields of the form) another transaction would get fired and perform processing on it, and so on and so on. Of course the screens had rudimentary markup to support this including client-side validation of sorts.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  I personally don't care about how it's implemented, markup or otherwise, I'd just be happy to see TUIs return in numbers for modern terminal emulators. SSH apps are slowly becoming a thing, thankfully, but not quickly enough for my liking.

ordiel 4y ago

Developers of newer versions of a system even if it is a migration from TUI to a Web GUI should really strive to maintain the shortcuts and hotkeys, an upgrade its suposed to be "that", extra functionality not a replacement of the existing one. Sadly there is this assumption that given it has a GUI there is no need of shortcuts or hotkeys, forcing users to use the mouse. Gmail does provide some hotkeys and I think even those "few" ones really help, also Atlassian applications yet most web pages I have interacted with have none

fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
Part of the problem here is that desktop development frameworks included keyboard shortcuts essentially for free: Mac associates them with menu items, emacs/vim's key -> command -> action design give an obvious place to implement shortcuts; Delphi and similar programs had similar places to automatically slot in keyboard shortcuts. Web frameworks focus on visuals and mouse interactivity and keyboard control is almost an afterthought (aside from some minimal attention to tab-order because of accessibility).
- mook 4y ago
  Another part of the problem is that the contents of the browser is mostly untrusted, and the browser itself already has a giant pile of shortcut keys that would conflict.
bombcar 4y ago
Excel had Lotus-123 shortcut compatibility for decades after Lotus-123 was no longer a going concern. It's still somewhat in there with / triggering the menu on Windows Excel.