I suggest that you need to look at the historical context of it.
When DOS was the uncontested king of business computing, user interfaces were all over the place. Every app had its own UI, its own keystrokes, its own everything.
To steal some text I wrote for Wikipedia:
In WordPerfect, the command to open a file was F7, 3.
In Lotus 1-2-3, a file was opened with / (to open the menus), F (for File), R (for Retrieve).
In Microsoft Word, a file was opened with Esc (to open the menus), T (for Transfer), L (for Load).
It was a mess and a significant effort to learn multiple apps.
Then classic MacOS and MS Windows started to introduce the idea of uniform UIs, where programs had the same menu bar with the same core menus with the same commands on them, opened and navigated with the same keystrokes.
It made life so much easier. A lot of apps came across, even big-name ones -- for instance MS Word (v5.0, proprietary 2-line menus at the bottom of the screen; v5.5, CUA menu bar); WordPerfect (added CUA menus in v5); Borland Quattro; etc.
And if you have a standard menu bar, then you more or less need to have dialog boxes as part of the UI.
Once you go that far, you may as well apply it to multiple documents support and so on.
And so you end up with a familiar, more-or-less harmonious UI across different apps from different vendors, and for the first time it became possible to operate a program you'd never seen before first time.
This was a huge win for usability, accessibility, and it saved time, effort and stress for millions of people.
It was a triumph. That UI persists today in most modern FOSS apps and desktops, except for intentional rebels like GNOME 3, who want to make us all use phones with big screens.
If I am going to use a text editor, say, in the shell sometimes, then YES I want it to use the same UI I have in my GUI session, with the same keystrokes and menu options. Life is much to short to learn some crappy half-assed UI from the 1970s because a bunch of old dudes with beards have loved it ever since.
I'm 51. I lived the era you're describing, so yeah, I understand the historical context quite well.
But you're crossing the streams a little here.
Yes, it was a net win for the shift to GUIs to include a shift to very, very consistent interfaces.
HOWEVER, it doesn't follow that goofy, hamfisted attempts to mimic those interfaces in text mode was a good idea. If you want that, just go use Windows (or the Mac).
Word for DOS 5.0 was a fantastic program that I could move around in VERY VERY VERY quickly. It was powerful, stable, and extremely usable once you learned its interface.
Word 5.5 for DOS ripped out the ESC menus for a crappy text-mode UI, and basically killed the product. (For my part, I immediately uninstalled it and reinstalled 5.0 so I could get work done.)
But I _strongly_ disagree. In fact I think I could reasonably say that I couldn't disagree more.
I thought it was a huge win when DOS and console-mode apps adopted the general Windows-like UI.
I worked in support back then. I had to learn many dozens of apps to support them.
For instance...
In word processors, on DOS alone I worked with MS Word, WordPerfect, DisplayWrite, MultiMate, WordStar (classic, 1512 (i.e. Express), & 2000 — all different), Samna Executive, PC-Write, VolksWriter, XyWrite, Protext, PFS:Write, and also LocoScript (from the Amstrad PCW, later on DOS). Probably others.
Spreadsheets: Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Symphony, AsEasyAs, SuperCalc, Quattro, MS Multiplan. Probably more.
I had to learn all of them, all separately, either at least the basics (I think Samna is the only one that defeated me there), or in multiple cases, pretty much inside-out.
I mean, as an example, I didn't consider myself a guru, but I interviewed for https://www.newtonim.com/ in about 1992 and I got a record-best score (about 98%) in their test of my WordPerfect and 1-2-3 skills. Neither was even my favourite program of its type!
It was a massive pain.
I mean, yes, you're right, some of them were highly efficient interfaces. I didn't hate 1-2-3 or MS Word for their idiosyncratic 2-line menus. You had to memorize them to be fast and efficient, but it wasn't that hard and once you had, it was as you say very quick.
Unlike, say, WordPerfect with its wretched Ctrl-F3, Alt-F6, Shift-F2, Alt-Shift-F8 workflow. Horrible and basically impossible to discover. If you didn't have that little cardboard keyboard template, you were doomed.
But I didn't have the luxury of picking 1 app of each type and using only those. At work I used PCs with PC DOS, at home I used CP/M and Locoscript, later Acorn RISC OS, later still OS/2 2. I did charts and DTP on classic MacOS.
All totally different, and my job meant knowing _all_ of the leading contenders in all categories.
Sure it was possible to write attractive, efficient, DOS menuing systems. Novell's DOS menuing system on Netware clients and on the server itself was fast, easy, efficient, and attractive.
So was 3Com 3+Share -- probably last seen by most people in the config tool for the classic 3C509 NIC.
But they were totally different from one another.
So if you only used MS Word, good for you. I envy you the simplicity that may have lent.
But for those of us who changed apps considerably more than every day -- more like ever hour of every day -- no, the profusion of DOS UIs was a complete pain in the neck and made my job 10× more difficult.
So when they all went away, replaced by a text-only version of the Windows/CUA guidelines, I celebrated. It made my life so very much easier.
Which is why now, 3 decades later, I absolutely refuse to learn the horrid 1970s BS UIs of Emacs or Vim. I don't care how powerful they are. I'm not interested. I gave that rubbish up in about 1990-1991 and for me all those proprietary UIs died once the next-gen ones came along.
You're still litigating the idea of interface standardization, which isn't the thing I was saying was a terrible idea.
Your background is not normal. Most people doing actual work in that era used the word processor they had, not seven word processors.
In a limited environment -- text mode -- efficiency and speed > cuddly GUIs. If you wanted the common interface, install Windows; don't fuck up the existing interfaces of tools people were VERY VERY good at to graft some horribly ugly faux-GUI on them.
>I absolutely refuse to learn the horrid 1970s BS UIs of Emacs or Vim
Given the longevity and popularity of these tools, coupled with their broad availability on so many platforms, this sentence reads more like "I'm proudly ignorant!" than anything else.
Believe me, tech support is actual work. Without it, all those writers and accountants wouldn't get much done.
The CUA interface is perfectly efficient and works very well. It doesn't need a mouse, although you can use one if it's there.
As I said: I was a skilled user of a bunch of the leading pre-CUA DOS apps, and I can navigate a CUA interface using hotkeys very quickly and efficiently without a pointing device. Occasionally, over the years, astounded onlookers have asked how it's possible that I can operate Windows so quickly. The answer is that I don't use the mouse much, and the reason is that in my first job, my employers didn't own a PC mouse. They sold Macs; if you wanted to do graphical pointy-clicky stuff, you bought a Mac.
I decided that Windows looked like it was useful and could be big one day, so I installed Windows 2.01 and learned to use it... without a mouse. The same keystrokes mostly still work today, from obvious ones like Ctrl+S to save, Ctrl+X/C/V for Cut/Copy/Paste, to less-known ones like Ctrl-W for Close Window and Alt-F4 for Close Program. Alt-Space for the window control menu, then X to maXimise, etc.
It's a common but spurious argument to claim that because one knows one particular program well and can operate it very quickly, that this fact in some way indicates that the program's UI is particularly efficient or well-designed or something. It isn't. It just means that that individual knows it well.
The basic concepts of the desktop GUI were nicknamed WIMP: Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer. Well, each of those works fine in isolation. Icons are a useful abstraction all on their own; for instance, iOS and Android make very extensive use of the "I" part without the "W," "M" or "P".
By the same token, the W and M parts -- windows and menus -- work very well without a GUI. It's very handy that the same keystrokes that let me drive Geany or Mousepad or Notepad also work fine in Tilde or MS-DOS Edit.
They're no less efficient. Ctrl+S Ctrl-W to Save then Close is just as quick as ^KS ^KD, or !wq, or C-s C-x, or Shift+F3, Ctrl+F4.
But what's a huge boon to my or anyone's efficiency is that once I've learned Ctrl+S, say, it works in thousands of programs on multiple OSes. C-s C-x or Shift-F3 don't work in anything except the one particular app they were designed for.
I used poor wording. Support is definitely work. I just mean that MOST people doing day-to-day work USING tools (vs supporting them) only deal with one at a time.
A UI's utility isn't determined by whether or not it's shared with other tools. It's determined by *how well users can get work done with it* which is why a host of non-CUA interfaces persist today.
Text-mode CUA was and remains horribly ugly and clunky. If you want that, go use a GUI.
What I am saying is that in this case, I put it to you that this is more than simply a matter of opinion and personal preference.
There are demonstrable, measurable advantages to this approach. Knowledgeable users can work on unfamiliar programs immediately by using standard keystrokes and via prior knowledge of how the menus will work.
Unskilled users, so long as the machine has a mouse configured, can simply use the console/terminal app in the same way as they're used to, by point-and-click.
I get that you hate it. What I am trying to tell you is that I _really_ like it. It is a _strong_ preference of mine, I find it asthetically pleasing as well as convenient, and I hate and refuse to fight with non-compliant apps that don't use it. Including _both_ of the xNix world's favourite editors, Vim and Emacs -- I hate both -- *and* all the alternatives people recommend: Joe, Pico, Nano, etc.
I get that you have a preference. That is your choice. But you are trying to make out that it's a universal truth, that your opinion is an objective fact, and it's not.
Whether you, or anyone, likes it is neither here nor there. It helps. It works. It's useful. It makes life easier.
And if the price of that is that some people's aesthetic sensibilities are offended, well... sorry dude, tough.
When DOS was the uncontested king of business computing, user interfaces were all over the place. Every app had its own UI, its own keystrokes, its own everything.
To steal some text I wrote for Wikipedia:
In WordPerfect, the command to open a file was F7, 3.
In Lotus 1-2-3, a file was opened with / (to open the menus), F (for File), R (for Retrieve).
In Microsoft Word, a file was opened with Esc (to open the menus), T (for Transfer), L (for Load).
It was a mess and a significant effort to learn multiple apps.
Then classic MacOS and MS Windows started to introduce the idea of uniform UIs, where programs had the same menu bar with the same core menus with the same commands on them, opened and navigated with the same keystrokes.
It made life so much easier. A lot of apps came across, even big-name ones -- for instance MS Word (v5.0, proprietary 2-line menus at the bottom of the screen; v5.5, CUA menu bar); WordPerfect (added CUA menus in v5); Borland Quattro; etc.
And if you have a standard menu bar, then you more or less need to have dialog boxes as part of the UI.
Once you go that far, you may as well apply it to multiple documents support and so on.
And so you end up with a familiar, more-or-less harmonious UI across different apps from different vendors, and for the first time it became possible to operate a program you'd never seen before first time.
This was a huge win for usability, accessibility, and it saved time, effort and stress for millions of people.
It was a triumph. That UI persists today in most modern FOSS apps and desktops, except for intentional rebels like GNOME 3, who want to make us all use phones with big screens.
If I am going to use a text editor, say, in the shell sometimes, then YES I want it to use the same UI I have in my GUI session, with the same keystrokes and menu options. Life is much to short to learn some crappy half-assed UI from the 1970s because a bunch of old dudes with beards have loved it ever since.
Even if I am an old dude with a beard now.