In my opinion, latency is a super important concept that got forgotten once we moved every application to web interfaces.
I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware. It was quite easy to type fast, move the focus around in the various forms using tab and shift-tab, move from tabs and windows with ctrl/alt-tab; and there was keyboard shortcuts for most things.
I remember being able to execute complex operations between multiple applications using only my keyboard and without having to use any brain power between each step.
Now most things are moved to cloud applications and we interact with them with web browsers. Keyboard shortcuts are (mostly) gone, and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world with a high HTTP latency, and that prevents the brain from chaining them for free.
I remember being able to do almost everything using my keyboard. Now good luck interacting with a web console without switching back and forth from keyboard to mouse for 50% of the steps.
I guess that's also why many developers (including myself) still love the CLI environments.
> I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware
I think there's a bit of rose tinted glasses here. You could literally see windows and icons being drawn on the screen in the 90s. Even text UI were slow to draw on screen. We have it good today.
Regarding keyboard shortcuts we are good too. I barely use a mouse nowadays. I use Vimium for Chrome to "click" on elements in pages, i3 keyboard shortcuts to jump to specific applications or workspaces, and the mouse emulator on my keyboard (olkb) to click or use the scrollwheel on the odd thing that doesn't want to work with a keyboard. Luckily many programs have adopted the command palete (most editors, vscode, gimp, etc) so it's easy to quickly invoke commands without memorizing arcane shortcuts.
> and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world
Heck, each keystroke does this on a lot of websites, usually the culprit is some kind of overly ambitious search function. My biggest pet peeve is trying to type something via phone keyboard and losing half the word because it's ignoring inputs made while it's waiting on some http request. I notice the worst offenders are retailer websites (Menards, Target, Walmart, etc)
I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware. It was quite easy to type fast, move the focus around in the various forms using tab and shift-tab, move from tabs and windows with ctrl/alt-tab; and there was keyboard shortcuts for most things. I remember being able to execute complex operations between multiple applications using only my keyboard and without having to use any brain power between each step.
Now most things are moved to cloud applications and we interact with them with web browsers. Keyboard shortcuts are (mostly) gone, and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world with a high HTTP latency, and that prevents the brain from chaining them for free.
I remember being able to do almost everything using my keyboard. Now good luck interacting with a web console without switching back and forth from keyboard to mouse for 50% of the steps.
I guess that's also why many developers (including myself) still love the CLI environments.