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The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. I've seen a lot of failed projects for

The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. I've seen a lot of failed projects for data entry apps because the experienced workers tend to prefer the terminals over the web apps. Usually the requirement for the new frontend is driven by management rather than the workers. Which is understandable to me as a programmer. If it's a task that I'm familiar with, I can often work much more quickly in a terminal than I can with a GUI. The assumption that this is different for non-programmers or that they are all scared of TUIs is often a mistaken assumption. The green screens also tend to have fantastic tab navigation and other keyboard navigation functionality that I almost never see in web apps (I'm not sure why as I'm not a front end developer, but maybe somebody else could explain that). I'll defend green screens all day long. Lots of people like them and I like them. Everything else you listed I would agree with you about being terrible and mostly hated though.

ksenzee 2y ago
These days most web apps aren’t written to take advantage of the browser’s built-in tab navigation, and unless the dev is a keyboard user, they don’t even think to add it. This is largely the fault of React reinventing everything browsers already have built in, and treating accessibility as an afterthought. Bare metal web apps written in straight-up HTML do have decent tab navigation. They’re still not as snappy as a green terminal app, though. My first summer temp jobs during college were data entry, in the era when you might get a terminal app or a web app, and the old apps invariably had better UX.
avhception 2y ago
I second the TUI argument here. Back in ... maybe 2005 or what, in our ~60 people family business, I had the pleasure to watch an accountant use our bespoke payroll system. That was a DOS-based app, running on an old Pentium 1 system. She was absolutely flying through the TUI. F2, type some numbers, Enter, F5 and so on and so on, at an absolutely blistering speed. Data entry took single-digit seconds. When that was changed to a web app a few years later, the same action took 30 seconds, maybe a minute. Bonus: a few years later, after we had to close shop and I moved on, I was onboarding a new web dev. When I told him about some development-related scripts in our codebase, he refused to touch the CLI. Said that CLIs are way too complicated and obsolete, and expecting people to learn that is out of touch. And he mostly got away with that, and I had to work around it. I keep thinking about that. A mere 10 years before, it was within the accepted norm for an accountant to drive a TUI. Inevitable, even. And now, I couldn't even get a "programmer" to execute some scripts. Unbelievable.
- lenkite 2y ago
  Things have changed back though - the CLI is hot again at-least amongst developers.
  - jsk2600 2y ago
    I find it ironic that we developers prefer to use CLI because it's quick, efficient, stable, etc., but what we then deliver to people as web apps is quite the opposite experience.
    - pc86 2y ago
      It's what the default is. TUIs default to fast, stable, high-information-density, so you have to real work to make them otherwise. And I say this next part as primarily a front-end developer the past few years: web apps default to slow, brittle, too-much-whitespace "make the logo bigger" cruft, and it takes real work to make them otherwise. At the end of the day most people are lazy and most things, including (especially?) things done for work, are low quality. So you end up with the default more often than not.
    - stefs 2y ago
      in my experience, many managers tend to try to dumb products down as much as possible, to make it work for the most people. the problem is that this, together with the usual bad ui/ux, makes the product inefficient to use, especially for power users. then, every couple of years, a startup tries to carve out a niche by making a product that caters to power users and makes efficiency a priority. those power users adopt it and start to recommend it to other regular users. this usually also tends to work quite well because even regular users are smarter than expected, especially when motivated. thus the product grows, the startup grows and voila, a tech giant buys it. now one of the tech giants managers gets the task to improve profits and figures out, the way to do this is to increase the user base by making the product easier to use. UX enshittification ensues, the power users start looking out for the next niche product and the cycle starts anew. rule of thumb: if the manager says "my grandma who never used a computer before in her life must be able to use it", abandon ship.
    - 2y ago
fifticon 2y ago
We had a tower of bable collapse, when we switched to web UI. We gained a million things and lost a million things. There was an era from around 1985 to early 2000s, where a large majority of applications had a (somewhat) consistent UI, based partially around MS-Windows, partially around some IBM 'common ui' design guide principles. The hall-marks of it was - keyboard navigation was possible - mostly consistent keyboard nav - common limited set of UI controls with consistent behaviour - for serious applications, there was some actual thought related to how the user was supposed to navigate through the system during operation (efficiency) Post-web and post 9/11, where web browser UI has infested everything, we are now in a cambryan explosion of crayon-eating UI design. It seems our priorities have been confused by important things like 'Hi George. I just noticed, that for the admin panels in our app, the background colours of various controls get the wrong shade of '#DEADBF' when loading on the newest version of Safari, can you figure out why that happens?'. 'Oh, and the new framework for making smushed shadows on drop-downs seems to have increased our app's startup time on page transitions from 3.7 seconds to 9.2 seconds, is there any way we can alleviate that, maybe by installing some more middleware and a new js framework npm module? I heard vite should be really good, if you can get rid of those parts where we rely on webpack?'
jsk2600 2y ago
>The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. Agree! Back in 2005, I was involved in a project to build a web front end as a replacement for the 'green screen' IBM terminal UI connecting to AS400 (IIRC). All users hated the web frontend with passion, and to this day, I do not see web tech that could compete in terms of data entry speed, responsiveness, and productivity. I still think about this a lot when building stuff these days. I'm hoping one day I'll find an excuse to try textualize.io or something like this for the next project :)
pc86 2y ago
This only matters if "quick and more responsive" is the only thing that matters. Yes of course you can enter payroll timesheets on a TUI if you spend days/weeks/months gaining that muscle memory. The same way you can edit in vim much faster than vscode or Eclipse if you spend weeks/months/years gaining that muscle memory. The fact that someone who has been doing it for years can do it faster is obvious, and pretty irrelevant. Take someone who has never used either, and they'll enter data on the web app much faster. You don't see keyboard nav in most web apps for similar reasons. First-time users won't know about it, there's no standard beyond what's built-in the browser (tab to next input, that kind of thing), and 90% of your users will never sit through a tutorial or onboarding flow, or read the documentation.
- quantified 2y ago
  Are these really at odds with each other? You can have keyboard and click nav for any app.
- zifpanachr23 2y ago
  For a work app doing data entry, there is supposed to be training for users, because it's somebody's job to use the program consistently all the time everyday. I would agree with you if we were talking about a customer facing webpage or something. But an app for say an accountant? That should be a TUI or as fast as a TUI. The workers are literally hired to get over the learning curve and become fast with the app, so it's not as big a concern if first-use is more difficult. You arent trying to sell them a product and drive higher percentage click through. I 100% agree with you for applications for say online shopping. Those should prioritize new user experience over long time user efficiency probably.
grogenaut 2y ago
Is there a good tuinfor web?

ksenzee 2y ago

These days most web apps aren’t written to take advantage of the browser’s built-in tab navigation, and unless the dev is a keyboard user, they don’t even think to add it. This is largely the fault of React reinventing everything browsers already have built in, and treating accessibility as an afterthought. Bare metal web apps written in straight-up HTML do have decent tab navigation. They’re still not as snappy as a green terminal app, though. My first summer temp jobs during college were data entry, in the era when you might get a terminal app or a web app, and the old apps invariably had better UX.

avhception 2y ago

I second the TUI argument here. Back in ... maybe 2005 or what, in our ~60 people family business, I had the pleasure to watch an accountant use our bespoke payroll system. That was a DOS-based app, running on an old Pentium 1 system. She was absolutely flying through the TUI. F2, type some numbers, Enter, F5 and so on and so on, at an absolutely blistering speed. Data entry took single-digit seconds. When that was changed to a web app a few years later, the same action took 30 seconds, maybe a minute. Bonus: a few years later, after we had to close shop and I moved on, I was onboarding a new web dev. When I told him about some development-related scripts in our codebase, he refused to touch the CLI. Said that CLIs are way too complicated and obsolete, and expecting people to learn that is out of touch. And he mostly got away with that, and I had to work around it. I keep thinking about that. A mere 10 years before, it was within the accepted norm for an accountant to drive a TUI. Inevitable, even. And now, I couldn't even get a "programmer" to execute some scripts. Unbelievable.

lenkite 2y ago
Things have changed back though - the CLI is hot again at-least amongst developers.
- jsk2600 2y ago
  I find it ironic that we developers prefer to use CLI because it's quick, efficient, stable, etc., but what we then deliver to people as web apps is quite the opposite experience.
  - pc86 2y ago
    It's what the default is. TUIs default to fast, stable, high-information-density, so you have to real work to make them otherwise. And I say this next part as primarily a front-end developer the past few years: web apps default to slow, brittle, too-much-whitespace "make the logo bigger" cruft, and it takes real work to make them otherwise. At the end of the day most people are lazy and most things, including (especially?) things done for work, are low quality. So you end up with the default more often than not.
  - stefs 2y ago
    in my experience, many managers tend to try to dumb products down as much as possible, to make it work for the most people. the problem is that this, together with the usual bad ui/ux, makes the product inefficient to use, especially for power users. then, every couple of years, a startup tries to carve out a niche by making a product that caters to power users and makes efficiency a priority. those power users adopt it and start to recommend it to other regular users. this usually also tends to work quite well because even regular users are smarter than expected, especially when motivated. thus the product grows, the startup grows and voila, a tech giant buys it. now one of the tech giants managers gets the task to improve profits and figures out, the way to do this is to increase the user base by making the product easier to use. UX enshittification ensues, the power users start looking out for the next niche product and the cycle starts anew. rule of thumb: if the manager says "my grandma who never used a computer before in her life must be able to use it", abandon ship.
  - 2y ago

fifticon 2y ago

We had a tower of bable collapse, when we switched to web UI. We gained a million things and lost a million things. There was an era from around 1985 to early 2000s, where a large majority of applications had a (somewhat) consistent UI, based partially around MS-Windows, partially around some IBM 'common ui' design guide principles. The hall-marks of it was - keyboard navigation was possible - mostly consistent keyboard nav - common limited set of UI controls with consistent behaviour - for serious applications, there was some actual thought related to how the user was supposed to navigate through the system during operation (efficiency) Post-web and post 9/11, where web browser UI has infested everything, we are now in a cambryan explosion of crayon-eating UI design. It seems our priorities have been confused by important things like 'Hi George. I just noticed, that for the admin panels in our app, the background colours of various controls get the wrong shade of '#DEADBF' when loading on the newest version of Safari, can you figure out why that happens?'. 'Oh, and the new framework for making smushed shadows on drop-downs seems to have increased our app's startup time on page transitions from 3.7 seconds to 9.2 seconds, is there any way we can alleviate that, maybe by installing some more middleware and a new js framework npm module? I heard vite should be really good, if you can get rid of those parts where we rely on webpack?'

jsk2600 2y ago

>The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. Agree! Back in 2005, I was involved in a project to build a web front end as a replacement for the 'green screen' IBM terminal UI connecting to AS400 (IIRC). All users hated the web frontend with passion, and to this day, I do not see web tech that could compete in terms of data entry speed, responsiveness, and productivity. I still think about this a lot when building stuff these days. I'm hoping one day I'll find an excuse to try textualize.io or something like this for the next project :)

pc86 2y ago

This only matters if "quick and more responsive" is the only thing that matters. Yes of course you can enter payroll timesheets on a TUI if you spend days/weeks/months gaining that muscle memory. The same way you can edit in vim much faster than vscode or Eclipse if you spend weeks/months/years gaining that muscle memory. The fact that someone who has been doing it for years can do it faster is obvious, and pretty irrelevant. Take someone who has never used either, and they'll enter data on the web app much faster. You don't see keyboard nav in most web apps for similar reasons. First-time users won't know about it, there's no standard beyond what's built-in the browser (tab to next input, that kind of thing), and 90% of your users will never sit through a tutorial or onboarding flow, or read the documentation.

quantified 2y ago
Are these really at odds with each other? You can have keyboard and click nav for any app.
zifpanachr23 2y ago
For a work app doing data entry, there is supposed to be training for users, because it's somebody's job to use the program consistently all the time everyday. I would agree with you if we were talking about a customer facing webpage or something. But an app for say an accountant? That should be a TUI or as fast as a TUI. The workers are literally hired to get over the learning curve and become fast with the app, so it's not as big a concern if first-use is more difficult. You arent trying to sell them a product and drive higher percentage click through. I 100% agree with you for applications for say online shopping. Those should prioritize new user experience over long time user efficiency probably.

grogenaut 2y ago

Is there a good tuinfor web?