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Comment by Guest42 | Hacker News Reader

I've had similar experiences with green screen enterprise manufacturing software. It had a remarkable amount of features that were accessed via nested command sequences that didn't take too long to learn, and could easily handle 800 users simultaneously with no lag or interruption.

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I watched some order takers at a food service company a few years back. They worked in a green screen program -- not sure if it was DOS, or some terminal.

The speed at which they worked was unreal. Their hands never left the keyboard. They knew where everything was, and they could literally retrieve any information in less than one second, both due to the speed their fingers worked on the keyboard, and the responsiveness of the app.

I remember thinking that I need to pay more attention to keyboard-only usage of the next app I write.

Agreed, it's as though all features were organized carefully into a B tree that became polished over the years.

I met a guy some years back who specialized in rewriting accounting software user interfaces. He was a former accountant, so he knew all the things that accountants needed to do with software and the order things tended to need to happen. He focused a lot on input order flow. He claimed that the reduced cost of data entry easily paid for his services for his clients, and made the people using the software happier too.

You really don’t want someone good with reverse 10-key data entry to constantly be moving back to a mouse and try to click on some random button or input box.

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