[conductr]

At all times, people that are proficient at a green screen terminal application will prefer it to a web based or GUI based experience. They have muscle memory and a lot of codes memorized to switch back and forth from screen to screen extremely fast and exactly how many tabs to hit to fill out a form. It has nothing to do with SPA or whatever is currently new and flashy this has been going on for decades. The fact they have to remove their hand from keyboard to mouse pretty frequently is the biggest productivity loss, then drop down boxes and forms that aren’t very keyboard friendly and the page render times are incredibly slow in comparison.

I myself made this complaint a few times. When I was using medical erp once then again using a banking system. Both you could navigate by typing a chain of commands that would register even if you typed faster than the screens would render in the terminal. Hell, in the banking one I completely automated my job by writing an excel macro and sendkey commands to the terminal, then I sold it to the bank for a small sum after I quit (they asked me how I accomplished so much after realizing 3 people couldn’t handle my workload)

[arkh]

> Both you could navigate by typing a chain of commands that would register even if you typed faster than the screens would render in the terminal.

Nowadays even the login screen in Windows can not manage it anymore. Gotta wait for some animation and whatever it needs coming back from sleep mode before it starts registering keys.

[nostrademons]

You could still do this in the GUIs of 25 years ago, you'd just memorize the keyboard shortcuts and use them. They'd buffer so you could type a series of operations faster than the screen could render them, and basically every function was accessible from the keyboard. But the GUI had the advantage of discoverability - if you didn't know the keyboard shortcut, you could just work your way through the menus and find it.

[conductr]

While possible, the uptake/usage is very low once it requires lots of CTRL / ALT / CMD button sequences. Take something like Excel, which many users use daily for work, but most people likely only use less than a dozen common keyboard shortcuts. Practically nobody navigates the ribbon with their keyboard.

I'm in a role of Finance / Excel "super user" in my profession. There's a subculture of keyboard shortcut enthusiasts, but generally everyone is using their mouse a lot. I myself have about 20 that I use and rarely incorporate a new one into the mix, it has to be an action I perform repetitively for me to care enough to memorize seek out and learn the shortcut. I find navigating the ribbon usually requires too many keypresses and I instead have a custom quick access bar that I put everything I want access to so I don't have to toggle differing ribbons, I still use my mouse even though I know I could use my keyboard. It doesn't feel easier

[IIsi50MHz]

> Take something like Excel, which many users use daily for work, but most people likely only use less than a dozen common keyboard shortcuts. Practically nobody navigates the ribbon with their keyboard.

Partly, this is because:

- Excel has high latency to enter keyboard-access mode. Type too fast, and it misses keystrokes.

- Excel's ribbon keystrokes change depending on size of the window, and how much stuff has been added to the ribbon by VBA in the workbook, an add-in, or the user

- To a lesser extent: some of Excel's ribbon keystrokes "make sense", but some bear no relation the the target item even if a "sensible" keystroke is not already claimed by another target.

[hinkley]

But it’s true that the menu systems often made the accelerations and afterthought, and regularly used functions for some people had no shortcuts and no way to set them.

I still think a World of Warcraft style action bar, user configurable and multilayered, would work just fine for power users. You can put anything you want in position eight but most people have the same things set for 1-5.

[DidYaWipe]

That's funny. I automated a lot of my tech-writing job in the '90s with expansive macros written in WordBasic. What a great product.