TUI users have much less tolerance for “lag”

In a lot of ways, I think software that harkens back to an older era understood the assignment exceptional well: when you’re working on a glass TTY attached to a 9600 baud modem via a microwave network to the university computer in the next state over, the latency from the connection itself was pretty bad. So to then have inefficient software that “lags” would be intolerable.

Fast forward to the present day, with broadband and 1 ms latency, it’s less of a concern, sure. But good software remains good software, even if the environment has improved. And for some, my work often travels with me aboard the train, where the congested 4G backhaul really makes me appreciate the miserly bandwidth of vim and SSH.

I also find myself reconfiguring systems that only have no editor installed except VI (and sed, lol) due to disk constraints. So while the command set is grossly reduced from vim, they have similar commands and workflows that I can maintain proficiency even in these sparse environments.

“Lowest common denominator” software definitely has its use-cases.