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
GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
171–180 of 507 posts
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#172> 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)
this is absolutely not true since December 2025.
the amount of "nice to have" items I've been commanding LLM to develop is a dream come true.
while being better at QAing i finally get the time to work on the things that got me into programming in the first place, which in the point where human interact with the machine.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#173Power 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…
Where this falls apart is commercial software. The issue is we use off-the-shelf frameworks and tools for commercial software. And then we don't train developers on how to write high-volume software. Commercial software is THE power user use case. Your users will be using your software 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. And still, the software is obtuse point-and-click garbage. Meanwhile commercial software fro…
I think you vaaastly overestimate how excel is used by most users
if anything, excel exceeds in being MOUSE-driven - it's intuitive in what you press and what you drag
and that's kinda my problem with the TFA - author is not representative of typical user. Mouse interaction is the king
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#174I work on ADA a lot for my company. Please put on some headphones, turn on the voice assistant of your OS, put on some blinders, and run your app or website… no mouse, just keyboard. 1. Democracy is about access; make sure everyone has access to your software. 2. The keyboard allows folks with disabilities and power users to fly through your website/app… that being said… the second a tab is off, the person with a dis…
What do you mean by "a tab is off?"
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#175No. GUIs exist across a spectrum of form factors and use cases, many of which would be terrible with a keyboard.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#176Shortcat.app fills some of this gap.
I still haven't found generic solutions to selecting and copy-pasting text using the keyboard only though, when the text is not in a textbox/area.
I had used a vim-like plugin in firefox that let you do that somewhat, but nothing OS level.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#177I work on ADA a lot for my company. Please put on some headphones, turn on the voice assistant of your OS, put on some blinders, and run your app or website… no mouse, just keyboard. 1. Democracy is about access; make sure everyone has access to your software. 2. The keyboard allows folks with disabilities and power users to fly through your website/app… that being said… the second a tab is off, the person with a dis…
I had to keep accessibility in mind a lot in my previous job (web development for a university). The thing that I consistently found was that, the more accessible a website was, the better the experience for everyone, not just people with disabilities.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#178I work on ADA a lot for my company. Please put on some headphones, turn on the voice assistant of your OS, put on some blinders, and run your app or website… no mouse, just keyboard. 1. Democracy is about access; make sure everyone has access to your software. 2. The keyboard allows folks with disabilities and power users to fly through your website/app… that being said… the second a tab is off, the person with a dis…
My father is blind, the only tech he knows how to use is a smart tv, when i build him custom apps the first thing i do is turn off talkback when the app opens, so i can control what tts says. The regular talkback is so so annoying and repetitive
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#179TUI, GUI.. we need a marriage of both, with configurable levels of integration, which controls to favour TUI or GUI.
If it's well done, no need for a mouse, but nice and easy to have. Add to this a thin glove checking for certain movement patterns when the user is not typing and voice to set certain things - all at once.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Because people were triggering it by accident all the time. Firefox and Safari don't navigate back on backspace either. Enter only auto-submits if there's a visible submit button or if there's just one input, and that behavior goes back as far as I can remember.
right now, i cannot even enable Backspace = go back on Edge. I am forced to use Edge on my work computer and i hate that this feature is gone. Not disabled, just gone. About enter to auto submit, i've been running into this problem more often where some web frameworks just ignore the Enter key. There is a submit button, but i cannot trigger it via the enter key.
Every small feature is used by some subset of users, but if you don't trim your software from time to time then feature creep will eventually make it incoherent. Yes, it involves even small details like this one. I don't think learning another hotkey is a big problem, and anyone using keyboard navigation on the web should generally be at least aware of a ton of existing Vim-like navigation extensions (and even browsers)