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GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

ckardaris.com

61–70 of 510 posts

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#61
post #18

I have seen more GUIs these days that don't support even the bare minimum of using tab to cycle through various fields and selector buttons. Which as I recall was introduced in like windows 3.0.

Or page up/down.

I'd posit that less than a half a percentage of users have used the page up/down keys in the last year.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#62

Power user experience is not the same thing as user experience in general. If you want to make the argument that all developer tooling should be keyboard-driven, fine, be my guest. But most people aren't willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs, and that's okay. We shouldn't force it. HN's insistence on acting like all users are Arch Linux efficiency perfectionist hacker types is painfully corn…

The argument is that both should be supported, which seems like a valid wish. There's really no reason to either-or this. Just have both work.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#63
> The takeaway is simple. Do not compromise on the user experience you provide with your application

Same thing I hear from everyone.

"You can't compromise on UX" - UX experts.

"You can't compromise on security" - Security experts.

"You can't compromise on Accessibility" - a11y experts.

We gotta make trade-offs, and I gotta get my thing shipped (for me I learn toward security for my service)

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#64
post #44
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most GUIs should just be web. Hard disagree. Most web interfaces are worse than most native UIs. Inconsistent rendering, keyboard shortcuts and navigation between apps, slow response times, and more. There's a reason everyone who knows what Electron is bashes every "native" app built with Electron.

yeah--the reason is the bloat and overhead electron brings. nobody cares about the web layer

You're ignoring all of the other things I said.

Keyboard shortcuts, navigation, and more are inconsistent in web apps. Will they work at all? Will they use different keys? No one knows. Will they respect my OS theming? What about my font choices or font sizes? Almost certainly not.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#65

I hate nothing more than when a random mistype on a website or app causing shit i don’t understand to happen without reasonable ways to undo it or discover it. I don’t really care if the app can be controlled with a keyboard i want the ui to be discverable and usefull.

This can happen if the applications exposes single keys as shortcuts. If they are "hidden" behind the different modifiers (i.e. Ctrl, Cmd, Alt), then mis-clicks should not be possible or should be more tolerated.

The "intuitiveness" argument is also related. You cannot rebind well-known shortcuts to different actions and expect the user to not get frustrated.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#66
post #62

Power user experience is not the same thing as user experience in general. If you want to make the argument that all developer tooling should be keyboard-driven, fine, be my guest. But most people aren't willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs, and that's okay. We shouldn't force it. HN's insistence on acting like all users are Arch Linux efficiency perfectionist hacker types is painfully corn…

The argument is that both should be supported, which seems like a valid wish. There's really no reason to either-or this. Just have both work.

Well the two--building for power users vs for a general audience--often work against each other.

And trying to satisfy every audience at once is a good way to satisfy none. You don't want your app to be a Jack of all trades; focus is really valuable.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#67

I agree but I think being usable by the keyboard isn't enough, because the shortcuts are often hard to discover and remember. I think the ideal is - like good TUIs - GUIs should put obvious hints on screen how to navigate via keyboard. It would be really great to have some GUI frameworks for the common platforms (including web!) designed to do this and have some opinions on common shortcuts for common actions so we c…

Agreed. Also, I would support everyone building off of vim principles. If keyboard bindings are somewhat consistent across applications, that would be really nice and there are already a bunch of options using vim bindings as a starting point, since they make intuitive sense once you've learned the "language" vim uses.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#68

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.

You can always take it to the next level by using an extension like vimium[1]. [1]: https://github.com/philc/vimium/

Yes I tried it for a while, it can be nice.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#69
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.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#70

> The takeaway is simple. Do not compromise on the user experience you provide with your application Same thing I hear from everyone. "You can't compromise on UX" - UX experts. "You can't compromise on security" - Security experts. "You can't compromise on Accessibility" - a11y experts. We gotta make trade-offs, and I gotta get my thing shipped (for me I learn toward security for my service)

> We gotta make trade-offs

You could compromise on not-shipping-before-it's-ready.

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