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myth2018

Indeed.

I'd also mention a small experiment I often do.

If you have the opportunity of visiting a company still using COBOL, Clipper or some other text mode software, ask their users for an opinion on those old systems compared to the current ones.

Most of them prefer the acient ones. When asked why, they simply say "I don't know. It works, it feels right".

Even the younger users (who already had experience with web applications, big tech's stuff etc when they joined the company) prefer the text based ones.

I'm not at all implying that every software should be text based. But I think there are some very important lessons to be learned here. Things we developers used to know, intuitively.

I think UX designers should listen more to those users and less to theories and to Google and its MDC trying to make the internet look like their own products

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I don't think the issue is text based or non text based. In my opinion, the problem is TOOL versus ASSISTANT. A tool is easy to understand and does one thing, an Assistant is more hand waving, tries to guess what you "really" want, steers you away from error and lures you into something.

Can confirm. Started out writing code in IDEs, now I'm using Vim and CLI utilities. It's a polished, stable ecosystem that doesn't hide anything from the user and isn't incentivised to do anything other than its purpose, and that becomes very noticeable once you're familiar with it.

It doesn't come with file sync, plugin management or flashy animations. But I also don't get loading screens, don't need to look at SaaS pricing tiers and don't get overwhelmed by UI dark patterns. That's a trade-off I'll take any day.

One of the great things about command-line interfaces of old are that you could often enter your keyboard input faster than the system could respond to it, and it was OK because the system buffered them up for you and executed them as it caught up.

So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace.

With "better" GUI/mouse based systems, you have to click here, wait... wait... wait..., now click there, wait... wait... wait..., then click there and type in your SKU. Your attention needs to be on the screen at all times in order to wait for the UI and aim the mouse.

Next time you go to your bank web site to pay a bill, think to yourself: Wouldn't it be nice if, rather than navigating their cumbersome UX, you could just hit a known string of keystrokes that you memorized, hit enter, then walk away to get coffee while all the Javascript and page reloading chugged along and paid your bill?

So much this! I've noticed how common it is that interfaces can't keep up with me when, by all rights, they should be able to! I'm a limited, slow human, while their instructions execute billions of times per second. And yet I'm constantly running into scenarios were the next screen comes up and I try to give it an input, but it's not ready. Or when I hit the next-preset button for my car radio, and yet it has to pause to load that station before I can use the button again.

Yea. I have 48 cores on my workstation at work, dozens of gigabeans of RAM and an ultra-mega-terra-gigabit ethernet connection, and still I sit there watching spinners as websites composed primarily of text and images struggle to load.

It's like we're regressing year after year.

Right, any desktop app where you have to wait for a non-stupid operation (like a Gaussian blur on a 50mpix image) makes me want to throw my computer through the window. It's 100% unacceptable, every interaction should have its result in the very next frame, and we have all the tools for that.

That would be nice but it is impossible because to actually commit some money I have to go through 2FA involving the bank app on my phone and enter one or two other secrets on the bank website. This is Italy and probably most of EU since the last year.

I understand this is for the safety of my money, probably also for the safety of the bank itself (if something goes wrong it's more and more my fault) but sending money to someone is becoming a PITA.

Even checking your balance from your non-mobile device is quite a pain now. It's much more likely for me to miss a fraudulent transaction now since I no longer login on a daily basis.

"So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace."

This gave me goosebumps.

Indeed. I'd never realized the power of keyboard strokes buffering

There actually are a few plugin managers for Vim. I think i used Vundle once upon a time, but honestly don't recall.

My biggest pet peeve with vim and emacs is that (a) discovery sucks as with most all text mode tools, and (b) emacs in particular is slow and difficult to configure to get some mainstream languages working. Doom was the closest I ever got to being happy with my setup, but the tooltips and autocomplete were still objectively inferior even to vscode (for typescript and react, at least).

Lisps are a different story, but not by much. I'm actually fairly happy with using vscode to write common lisp, though I don't do much of it these days.

What? Discovery in Emacs is amazing; all the API is a keystroke away.

Do you mean something else?

*discovery for laymen

Emacs tells you to hit "Ctrl-h" when you start it. The documentation for Emacs is about as good as you can get for a software product.

(Now let's talk about Excel if you want to discuss discoverability issues.)

Sorry to come at this late but there's discoverability-by-doing and I think it's clear from general user feedback that emacs doesn't have it.

I agree it's very well documented, and I assume your impulse upon reading the previous paragraph is to tell me there's a REPL. it's simply not casually approachable. sorry. ask someone who isn't drowning in koolaid!

Note that the GP said

> It doesn't come with... plugin management

Also, for Vim, `:<tab>` gives you all available commands in the current buffer and `:h command` gives you the vim help page for that command (which is usually at least a few sentences long, and pretty thorough).

> Also, for Vim, `:<tab>` gives you all available commands in the current buffer

Don't misunderstand me, I love vim and use it almost exclusively and everyday, but tab-ing in the way you describe yields 2-3 screenfulls of commands that I have to manually (well, with my eyes anyhow) scan to find what I want and it includes gems such as: "spellrare" and "{{{{{{{{"

The latter of which I do not know how to open a help page for.

To me "discoverable" would mean that I would be able to use this interface to learn more commands, but this is only as discoverable as having to read man-pages. Sure - that is a great way to learn, but it's not discoverable.

Now, what would probably get a little closer is if `:<tab>` opened a list if commands in an fzf-style list also listing their descriptions and maybe grouping them by some other way than just alphabet sort order.

(If anyone can tell me what is up with those '{' I would greatly appreciate it)

For a network of sites I am developing I am planning a command prompt where users can type /command for basically every function: /msg username, /logout, /search phrase, etc.

I did something similar for a web app at work and the people on the floor really liked it. It was mich faster than trying to mouse to things, especially when half of their task is scanning barcodes anyway.

Interesting! I had a similar idea but as a library to drop into existing sites, perhaps even be a browser extension. Vimium does a great job of enabling keyboard control over a website but I think a generic web CLI could take the experience even further.

When I started at my current employer we were running our retail management software on DOS terminals connected to a SCO Unix box. My experience with the system was that it wasn't intuitive or easy to learn, but was pretty bulletproof for the veteran users who had been working with it for ~30 years. I learned as much of it as I needed to know, and got to the point where I could do some tasks without even thinking about which keys I was pressing.

I helped set up the replacement system and received a lot of complaints from those same users - some resistance to change, but also some legitimate failings of the new software. Tradeoffs in the network structure made it run more slowly at satellite locations, Windows 10 on all of the terminals caused network issues until we got updates and bandwidth moderation dialed in, and some employees needed additional practice using a mouse.

I see trade-offs between the old and the new here. The new software is easier to train new users (less arcane) and able to securely handle things like chip credit cards (which had previously needed a separate card terminal system) and charge accounts. At the same time, the old system was faster (for the limited features it provided) and was able to run more smoothly on older equipment (very little OS overhead, text only network transmissions).

>text only network transmissions

As opposed to what, base64 images or something?

Text-only as opposed to encrypted text and images.

As far as I've been able to make out, document images are generated on the server and sent to the terminals as PostScript files. I've noticed at satellite locations the receipt printers hesitate for a few seconds before printing the barcode at the bottom, which tells me that either 1) it's taking some time to transmit the barcode image over the internet or 2) the server is taking its sweet time cataloguing the transaction in the document archive. Either way, I've gotten complaints about it from the users.

Having used 3270 terminal for time registration many years ago. And it was 1000 times better and faster than all the web apps that followed. So I can confirm this.

I'm working freelance and built my own cli for this exact purpose. I've been wanting to redo it as a web app, but i honestly like my cli tool better. It lives in git, and Gitlab CI handles generation of pdf/excel reports and uploading to Dropbox. Inputting new data is just so damn fast compared to opening any web app!

I would love to see that app.

Hi, it's not really documented all that well, but if you don't mind diving into code, then give it a go: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@lvqconsult/spatium-cli

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