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Posted by ckardaris 23 hours ago

GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven(ckardaris.com)
887 points | 439 commentspage 13
jehnnysmith 17 hours ago|
No.
drdec 18 hours ago||
Can we start with TUIs? At some point Claude code CLI stopped responding to the keys I had been using to scroll the presented plan and it seems only the mouse wheel works
yangshi07 21 hours ago||
But it is really hard to remember the shortcuts
ckardaris 21 hours ago||
You don't really need to remember everything though. Mouse navigation does not need to go away. The keyboard shortcuts should be available if you opt to use them, after which point you will be able to memorize them in short time.

The intuitive part of my argument also falls under this. By following known conventions as close as possible, we can eliminate the need to remember the most common actions.

Additionally, it is important to present your shortcuts in a shortcut window/dialog in a logical way for when the user needs to remember something.

In any case, an excesive number of keyboard shortcuts can have a negative effect on usability, so this is also important to keep in mind.

deathanatos 20 hours ago||
Tool-tips, having an accelerator next to the item in the menu/context menu, accelerator underlines, god forbid documentation … UIs have long had ways of having a simple way and hinting at, documenting, or showing to the user how to accelerate if you want to get quicker.
naravara 18 hours ago||
Co-sign. This is one of the reasons I’ve always loved NetNewsWire as my RSS reader and few things have been able to displace it. Everything is doable by keyboard, and the keyboard commands are extremely logical and intuitive. You can FLY through your backlog.

Excel is the same way. I’ve been an excel power user as well as a Sheets power user and the latter just never managed to enable the level of speedy keyboard navigation Excel could. I can almost work blindfolded in Excel.

godelski 19 hours ago||
I'm surprised there's only a single mention of tiling window managers here. No talk about i3[0] or hyprland[1]?

I mean these things aren't only highly usable, they're absolutely beautiful[2].

I'll also add that being keyboard driven helps people with disabilities AND makes things easier for AI agents. For exactly the same reason too. It's far easier for programs to hit key codes than try to determine pixel locations on a screen.

As a "power user" I still love TUIs but I also love good GUIs. Why should I be constantly lifting my hand to reach for the mouse? Though one of the big reasons I love living in the terminal is that it is extremely light weight. So many GUIs just eat up your system resources. I don't have that issue with TUIs. FFS, just compare 2 editors: (neo)vim vs Word. And before you say "Word does more" go ahead, add a hundred plugins to vim and then run that test again. vim will still win while also replacing VS Code, Obsidian, and a dozen other applications. The other big reason I love it is portability. Like the author mentions and is discussed in last week's thread, I can jump between machines (even through ssh!) and have no friction. I can have full control of my machine through ssh in a TUI while my mouse jitters while streaming the screen through either ssh or a VNC. I literally have to set different PS1s on my machines because otherwise there's no feedback telling me I'm connecting to something locally vs remotely.

But more importantly, let people do what they want. If you prefer to live in GUIs, do that. If you prefer to live in the terminal, do that. What's great about computers is the choice and flexibility. A big reason I'd support the OP here is that it exclusively adds to that. The ability to program computers and make them do what we, a random user and not an employee at some big tech company, want them to do is what made them take over the world. That even includes smart phones, where no two are alike (you all have different apps). Let's just make good products and let the best ideas flesh out. That's better than just arguing. I don't care if you use emacs, Atom, or program in fucking notepad++. You do you. But as devs we should add flexibility, not put people into boxes.

[0] https://i3wm.org/

[1] https://hypr.land/

[2] https://github.com/caelestia-dots/shell

Rover222 19 hours ago||
That title reads like a spoof of hackernews culture
nautilus12 19 hours ago||
My issue is that taking a strictly GUI driven approach makes you build an application (in the browser presumably) that will require more permissions than you would typically want in the terminal so TUIs win out by being in proximity to those tools (cat, ls, rm, etc) for development use cases
xbar 17 hours ago||
Well said. Now I just need a universal way to maintain consistency of my F-keys across all applications, including various browsers.
waffletower 20 hours ago||
Keyboard driven UIs are easier to instrument by alternative interfaces and has very positive accessibility implications. However, "shoulds" in computing lead toward a "tyranny of compounding responsibilities"; adding interface complexity to a project, particularly the suggested alternative input vectors may cross an upfront and/or maintenance development cost limit for a project.
neuroelectron 20 hours ago|
A lot of comments on VIM here. Vim is a terrible example and a pretty bad design overall, objectively. Legends of great productivity with vim is highly legendary, i.e. fiction. Classic Notepad/Word and similar Guis that have been widely adopted in Linux windowing systems are clearly superior and that's why they're so widely and silently adopted. Not a lot of fanfare for hierarchical GUI menus with keyboard shortcuts.
yndoendo 18 hours ago||
Your making a subjective statement not an objective one about VIM.

Objective would be making the statement that not all GUIs need to be keyboard-driven manged or have accessibility built-in.

Example, GUIs in automation are primary touchscreen driven and have user requirements base on the environment they are in.

GUI standards are objective to who the users actually are or will be.

zahlman 8 hours ago||
This style of flamebait is at least as old as Vim itself.
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