The mouse is amazing, if you have a good sensor, a mousepad and no mouse acceleration. Not many have this setup, but those who do can wield their cursor with insane speed and accuracy. Consider top osu! or Starcraft players.
GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
71–80 of 513 posts
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#72Power 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.
Which, if you made say a regular Win32 application, was guaranteed. These newfangled frameworks dropped the ball, if anything.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#73I really like this kind of thing but I wish there were more tutorials to help get good with keyboard shortcuts. vimtutor was lifesaving
My take in this case is to learn incrementally. Like the pebbles in the shoe, I remove the more painful one first (the shortcut for the action I do the most), get used to it, then remove next more painful., and so on. Usually I begin to get a little comfortable with 4 or 5 shortcuts.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#74> In fact, many GUI framework application guidelines explicitly encourage GUI application developers Instead they should be engineered in a way that allows users to bypass those developers in a (at least) framework-consistent way as there will never be a time when they collectively become "keyboard-wise".
In some cases they do.
For example a GTK app main context menu can be triggered with F10. But this relies on the developer to correctly "tag" said context menu.
In simple cases it is obvious what to do, but in more complicated designs, where you may be able to achieve the same visual output in different ways, it may not be so obvious.
In that case, it is up to the developer as well to read and try to follow the published guidelines.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#75Power 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…
Power user experience is not the same across disciplines either.
God forbid I should ever be forced to use Blender or Inkscape with only buttons.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#76Command palettes are great in this regard. They make commands accessible and discoverable entirely from the keyboard. I'm happy to see them becoming more popular.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#77Keyboard 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.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#78The 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.
There is, whether or not developers follow it is a different story. https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/practices/keyboard-interface...
That's not what I mean. The site you linked is about how to make a mouse-first website more keyboard friendly, but what I would like to exist is a mature keyboard-first guide.
I mean something like this (my wip keyboard-first file manager): https://ibb.co/G3WBW5C1
The hard part is, there seems to exist no UI & UX design language I can follow to create a nice keyboard-first app, so I have to think through everything (which is fun but tiring).
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#79The 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.
Top of my head:
- Tab to move across fields.
- Left-to-right, top-to-bottom focus.
- Space to toggle togglable stuff.
- Alt-Down Arrow to deploy drop-down stuff.
- Arrows to move around.
- Enter/Esc to accept/discard a modal.
Or maybe I misunderstand the things you call "mouse things".
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you have an example of how supporting a keyboard shortcut for every action could be bad for a general audience?