Comment by sgt
4 days ago
Web UI's for power tools are generally not a good idea. A browser will always have limitations and not quite reach the level of e.g. a TUI. On the other hand, TUI's as you point out has some serious limitations on its own.
So the answer is native app - I think what the world need is a super fast native spreadsheet that is NOT Excel. Kinda like a combination of Excel, TUI, and MS Access in one. Fast like Numbers.app, not sluggish like Excel is.
I'd use that. But it needs to have a keyboard centric operation, and be faster and a very solid, near industrial design, no "the latest flavor of someone's Figma design". I'm having a tough time explaining this.
What do you guys think?
Good to see (although I was more than sure there are) people thinking about this same thing.
I’m using Google Sheets for house and cars. Columns that should be easily grouped are using data validation and yes - few times deep into the experiment (because I’m sometimes lazy and miss some data - so experiment is good name) I’ve changed domain a little by adding columns. It meant empty values for existing rows - that I couldn’t fill in most cases, because a lot of time passed.
Reading many comments here I think we will create multiple frameworks/standards like always and some tools will be missing things others have :(
Funny thing is sheets works good and with scripts I can (still for free in terms of money) send notifications to selected channels or do some automated actions (like check disks status or order something automatically)
Edit: sheets have sync across devices too. Single SQLite for this specific case, having less nerdy people at home is an disadvantage.
> A browser will always have limitations and not quite reach the level of e.g. a TUI
There's no reason you can't jam a TUI into a browser. Perhaps to the surprise of both kinds of user, but it's possible.
> I think what the world need is a super fast native spreadsheet that is NOT Excel.
> I'd use that. But it needs to have a keyboard centric operation
You should boot up an emulator and check out the OG: Lotus 1-2-3. Keyboard driven, extremely fast, all written in 16-bit assembler for the original IBM PC running at, what, 4MHz?
It's because of Lotus 1-2-3's use of F2 for "edit cell" that F2 is still "edit" or "rename" in most applications.
(you can then continue the tour with WordPerfect and Borland Turbo Pascal, if you like light blue)