don't know if you used lotus 123 back in the day, but it was one of the best keyboard-driven interfaces i've seen. everything was done by navigating hierarchical menus, but the menus were displayed horizontally in a bar on the bottom of the screen, no popups to obscure the rest of the display. so if you were a power user you would just automatically type e.g. /fs to open the file menu and then the save option thereunder, but if you were new to it you could look down, see that /f was file and when you hit that the bar would change to include s:save and you could hit that.

I remember those horizontal menus; Lotus 1-2-3 really was the pinnacle of productivity. You could also create custom menus, assign shortcut keys to your macros, and of course have your macros call other shortcut keys. I was too young to use it for serious work back then, but the 123 and dBase combo really was a powerhouse.

That's awesome. I never used Lotus, but it sounds like it might have had the same idea before Wordstar which influenced me.