51–60 of 503 posts
Every action was keyboard first and only got mouse access later. Browsing by keyboard is not the browser's specific goal, but it was a feature from day 1!
Yes and no. The big advantage of a GUI is having interactive 2D coordinate input support (aka a pointer, or gestures.) While I think a keyboard can be a great control surface, that’s one thing it really lacks and only GUIs really offer. So to enforce that the whole GUI must be keyboard-drivable requires limiting the major advantage of the GUI. I’m a fan of the Emacs or Plan9 styles where the keyboard and pointer are…
This does not contradict the argument. The rest of the interface, everything that is known and stable in advance, should be full keyboard-driven.
Also a lot of webpages have it already built in, by pressing "?" they show a nice overlay. For example github and gmail have it.
For github I still ended up adding a quite a few more shortcuts.
The problem with keyboard navigation is that there seems to be no mature GUI keyboard-first UX concept. "Mouse things" are the way they are, because they fit the mouse-way. We need the same for the keyboard-way. Until then, there seems to be no design concept that can just be copied.
https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/practices/keyboard-interface...
HN's insistence on acting like all users are Arch Linux efficiency perfectionist hacker types is painfully corny.
(This reads harsher than I intended. Sorry about that. I love Arch Linux people. It's just think it's no less noble to serve the average Joe than to create the perfect tool for power users.)
A few years back I started to try to use my computer by not touching the mouse. Ended up writing a bunch of Tampermonkey scripts for my most used web pages to add fast keyboard navigation shortcuts. Also a lot of webpages have it already built in, by pressing "?" they show a nice overlay. For example github and gmail have it. For github I still ended up adding a quite a few more shortcuts.
Something to consider is a terminal that has keyboard navigation of its own. Through a terminal shortcut, I can move the cursor at will and copy any text at all, even if it's part of the interface of a TUI. If I want to copy the filepath of the file I'm working on in vim to then use in a shell, for example, it takes like 5 keys to copy it straight off vim's statusbar. A graphical text editor can display the filepath in a tab or something, but I can't copy the text off the tab.
I don't know if I'm alone in this, but it's very frustrating to want a piece text, see it in front of you, and you can't copy it because the developer for one reason or another didn't implement copying of that text, so you have to type it out even if it's right there.
Sometimes it seems on purpose too. For example, when a game on Steam gets updated terms of use, you get presented with a window showing the terms, but you can't copy them to save them. It's like the purpose is to just accept and forget the terms. A TUI can't prevent the user from copying text by its very nature.
Any terminal can implement this kind of arbitrary-text keyboard navigation on its own and have it work for all TUIs. Were e.g. GTK to implement something like this, it would only work for GTK apps, not for all GUI apps. This is exclusive of TUIs because TUIs are text-driven while GUIs are pixel-driven.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a system macOS definitely has some holes in keyboard navigation, as well as a couple corners which are KB-navigable but the way to focus them is not immediately obvious. On the app level, keyboard navigability depends on the developer. If they take the time to dot their I's and cross their T's it's between decent and great, but if they don't care it'll be bad.
"Some holes"? That's an understatement. There's no option to bring up a context menu with the keyboard. And there are no keyboard accelerators _AT_ _ALL_. Windows will underline the shortcut characters when you hold "alt".
I quote from Apple https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...:
> Always make context menu items available in the main interface, too. […] In macOS, an app’s menu bar menus list all the app’s commands, including those in various context menus.
Therefore one can rightly conclude that there is no need for a key to bring up a context menu.