The bottleneck with Skyscanner isn’t not being able to enter the dates without moving my hands, it’s waiting 30-50 seconds for all the flight options to appear, and trying to figure out “which ones are actually flights with the airplane and not third party resellers”.
Similarly with IDEs and programming - saving 0.5-2 seconds for 10-20 operations isn’t my bottleneck once I’ve decided to do the thing; waiting for the corporate antivirus to scan the chrome executable that has self updates since it last saw it, plus the VPN timeout because I haven’t logged into a corp site in 3 hours is.
Besides, visual tools can and do have very powerful shortcuts. ‘Make run’ takes longer to type than pressing F5 does, in visual studio. Photoshop, Maya, Nuke, ProTools, Final Cut, even Unity/Unreal are all graphical tools that have powerful widely used keyboard shortcuts.
GUIs have keyboard shortcuts for decades, blame the developer that wasn't up to their stuff, not providing keyboard navigation.
Heck, there are even Win32 and X Windows APIs designed with the exact purpose for keyboard navigation and shortcuts.
Maybe instead of doing TUIs one should better spend their time learning the tools of their craft.
Skyscanner failure to adopt such tooling, which browser also have due to accessibility requirements, has nothing to do with technical issues, all about skill and willingness where to spend budget.
The difference is keystroke buffering - the agent in sabre can type ahead while the system is processing a transaction, the web/gui user has to wait for each screen to load.
Its not the hardware keyboard buffer, its the tty readline or equivalent buffer which ends up being a like a stack of commands for the app which pops off the next buffered line after the previous line has processed.
Although I'm sure its technically possible to do it, in reality no gui apps work that way and extra keystrokes end up lost while web forms refresh or a 2 tier app is waiting for the DB to respond.
Compare a proficient travel agent who speaks Sabre to you booking a flight on Skyscanner. They’d whup your ass.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=G8n0_3t-EhI&pp=ygUPc2FicmUgY2xpI...