> it had the full attention of the computer and the user.

This why I like to use the full screen mode of my editors and IDEs.

It surprises a lot of people who see my screen. Full screen features are everywhere but rarely used.

Paying at Best Buy was torture - watching the cashier move their mouse around (on the slanted mousing surface they were given so they couldn't just let go) and click the buttons, going through 3 or 4 screens and waiting for them to load vs. using the keyboard. They would have been done with me and on to the next customer in half the time.

About twenty years ago I did a consulting gig for a government agency that wanted to create a web interface for their CSRs to replace the green screens they had been using. The long time employees hated it because they had deep muscle memory for most tasks on the green screens and could get far ahead of the screen refresh. With the web UI, not only could they not type ahead, but many of the workflows now required use of the mouse.

The agency was happy to have something new and modern but more important to them was that new employees could be trained on the system far faster. Even though there were a small number of long term employees, they had high turnover with the frontline CSRs, which made training a major issue for them.

The old TUIs were faster yet I still prefer IntelliJ; it's fast enough and much more powerful.

Even normal windows applications used to be like this (outside of crashing). I could alt-tab, type stuff and click where I know a button would show before I even saw the application window. It never missed a key stroke or type into the wrong window. Nowadays you load a webpage and start typing, and half you text appears and then the other half just never shows up.

They are control key sequences that are arranged so that a typist need never remover their fingers from the keyboard. The control key was to the left of the A so easily pressed with you left little finger.

You had full control of the cursor without the need for dedicated arrow keys or page up and down keys. It worked on a normal terminal keyboard. I first used it on an Apple ][ with a Z80 add-on that ran CP/M.

Sci-fi author Robert Sawyer (who has won Hugo and Nebula awards) is a big fan of Wordstar -- he uses it to write his books.

I highly recommend reading this:

https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

Most days, you’ll find me in sam, regexing my way to bliss like some monastic scribe with a terminal fetish. When I feel the urge to let AI stroke my curiosity or scaffold a long template like magic, I cut, paste, and drop it into a local or remote model like a well-trained familiar.

But I’ve also written larger applications and, frankly, a ridiculous amount of documentation in Acme. That 9P protocol was my backstage pass: every window, every label, was accessible and programmable. I could, for example, hook into a save event and automatically format, lint, and compile ten or fifteen years before most IDEs figured out how to fake that kind of integration.

Sure, the system demands precision. It doesn't coddle. But for me, that was the feature, not the bug. The rigor sharpened my thinking. It taught me to be exact or be silent, forcing me to pause when I usually would not.