Comment by estimator7292
6 hours ago
The cool thing about TUIs is that everything has an explicit label because it has to be this way.
On the system I use, every menu item was prefixed with a number. You punch in that number on the keyboard and you're in that menu. Just absolutely beautiful functionality
I had a summer job in a place with one of these. When I started, I was like “how does this guy know the 15 digit number for these screws?” By the end, I know the code for screws in general, the code for popular types, metric/imperial, and then it was like length and size. The numbers flashed up as well, so you wouldn’t have to memorize anything, but you quickly didn’t need to see the numbers for popular items.
This is the way. The "bicycle for your mind" that Jobs wanted. It augments your memory and enhances everything you do, and at every step you quickly internalize a system that doesn't change according to the whims of far-distant web devs.
GUIs used to have this too of course. Alt-F to bring up the file menu, the hotkey was underlined.
That seems to have slowly vanished over the last 30 years
I still have this and I loath programs that breaks this consistency by shipping their own graphics toolkit stacks. This is a reason for me to deinstall a program and never use it again. Programs that are not 3D games or specialized CAD programs should only be allowed to use the OS graphics stack and nothing else. (This includes programs shipped by the OS vendor.)