A decade ago there was an Eclipse version of this..
This guy is showing all three ways:
[... for new users]
For expert users? I'd pit it against any interface you want.
No-mouse + hands-on-keyboard + tab is hard to argue with.
Sadly, the number of people who remember when GUIs could be driven from memory by keyboard-only has dwindled.
Watch a 10-year veteran insurance employee use a green screen.
Or as a counter-example, try to tab through your modern app du jour. (Modern developers often don't even bother to set indexes correctly)
Yes! I knew an Insurance customer service op who self-described as having no computer skills, but when I saw her using Reflection it was like watching a speedcuber savant.
I would explain to them to stop after each screen or keystroke, so I could document it.
Despite being smart people and understanding the ask, almost every SME I worked with failed at some point, blazing through multiple screens without even realizing it.
That's some strong muscle memory there!
Linux CLI with a good modern shell and Python versus 3270 block mode and Rexx would be an interesting match up.
Similarly Emacs vs XEDIT.
This is so very true, and it's tragic.
Watch an experienced keyboard user, such as many blind users, navigating Windows and it's a wonder of efficiency and speed. It makes the Vim prowess of many Linux folks look very sad, because Vim is just a single editor, while with Windows' keyboard UI, the entire OS and all its apps are operable at this speed. Desktop, file manager, all bundled apps, all 3rd party apps... everything has one global unified keyboard UI.
The idea of "Unix as your IDE" is a deep, deep cut into Unix lore.
I was an intern at IBM UK in the late 80s and I had a 3279 on my desk connected to a 3090 mainframe. My recollection is that it was fine for editing and running code: sharp, bright text and snappy response. The clicky keyboard was nice too - probably the best I've ever used in the decades since - although the height of the enclosure would probably hurt my wrists now. The key caps had APL symbols on them too, which was interesting and prompted me to learn about that language a bit. Mostly I was writing APL and REXX code for image processing.
Some of the f/t employees I worked with had worked on the development of the 3297 at Hursley Park. They had some interesting stories.
The creators of JCL admitted later that the original sin of JCL was that it explicitly tried to NOT BE a programming language. Everything "programmable" evolved out of real-world needs, creating the mess that it has become.
You can see it today with "programming in YAML", whether it is Ansible, Kustomize, Kyverno (K8s manifests get a pass because they are just serialization of non-programmable thing), or any other weird "we started to add functions to JSON/YAML dumps"
From my own musings about making such a tool :)