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GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

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Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#131

Post by Balooga »

chuckadams wrote: post #106
eldaisfish wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are arguing against a strawman. Most reasonable people want support for both keyboard and mouse-based navigation. For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use? Same with some web forms where hitting enter in a text box does nothing. I expect it to submit a form, but very often, it does nothi…

> 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.

I'm surprised the person responsible for mapping to Back navigation didn't mandate that would be super awesome for Forward navigation.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#132

Post by ethin »

eldaisfish wrote: post #97
manlymuppet wrote: post #56

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…

you are arguing against a strawman. Most reasonable people want support for both keyboard and mouse-based navigation. For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use? Same with some web forms where hitting enter in a text box does nothing. I expect it to submit a form, but very often, it does nothi…

Agreed. I'll say the same about accessibility. People really need to test for this more. If your app is not accessible I literally cannot use your app regardless of how useful it might be. This is pretty much why I currently don't use IDEs like Zed: even if I wanted to I can't because it presents no accessibility tree.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#134

Post by Barrin92 »

thibran wrote: post #52

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.

>there seems to be no mature GUI keyboard-first UX concept.

I don't know about 'first' because I don't see a reason to privilege keyboard workflows over mouse workflows given how ubiquitous the latter is but Windows has had, for literally decades a 35 page Keyboard UI spec. They've put a fair amount of effort in applications being navigable in a consistent way.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#135

Post by minimeow »

The author makes an excellent point. There are too many poor Terminal UIs created just for the sake of having a TUI. Often these are not well constructed or lack sufficient thought to be effective/productive.

But the broader trend in GUI apps has been to target marketshare not deliver productivity for keyboard users. Back in the 80s and 90s Photoshop, Illustrator etc. became the powerhouses they are today because they focused on allowing professionals to be extremely efficient using their array of powerful keyboard shortcuts. In 2026 when software companies are dying of KPItis scoring their product management on creating compelling subscription models to hook customers, attention to actually delivering productivity for keyboard users is often an after thought. Mobile apps don't have keyboard shortcuts and desktop apps seem to increasingly be treated as as the narrow "edge case" with only a few hundred million target users versus the billions available on mobile devices. It's an opportunity for those who get serious about delivering value by leveraging the power of keyboard shortcuts to make their GUIs highly productive and comprehensively usable from the keyboard. For all their faults, Microsoft got this right with VSCode.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#136

Post by prmoustache »

fny wrote: post #75
manlymuppet wrote: post #56

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…

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.

Why do you introduce the concept of being forced to in the conversation?

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#137

Post by prmoustache »

Telaneo wrote: post #91
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of how supporting a keyboard shortcut for every action could be bad for a general audience?

Devil's advocate: showing the relevant keyboard shortcuts in the UI can be overwhelming (or at least one of many parts that all together become overwhelming) to new users, while not having them shown at all makes them undiscoverable. I think this is a bad reason. Even MS Office has made this work. But I've seen people act on this type of argument. If nothing else, it should be possible to have a settings menu where y…

> Devil's advocate: showing the relevant keyboard shortcuts in the UI can be overwhelming

That is not a requirement, having access to menus, a master help shortcut ir fuzzy search actions shorcut are other options.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#138

Post by jnpnj »

I'm a keyboard based UI lover, but I wonder if the supportive crowd is, and will ever, be too small.

Even crude AS400 days keyboard UIs were beyond nice. But then if people want to try and replicate emacs keymaps or vi command composition, better for the dozens of us. ^^

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#139

Post by SebastianKra »

I agree, but it's not that easy.

All UI's should be tab-able, but that's still a miserable experience for keyboard users. A keyboard-centric UI must provide instantly discoverable shortcuts. Possible methods:

- Put all elements on a grid so that they can be navigable with the keyboard. This is a significant restriction for the designer.

- Put keyboard shortcuts next to every button. It's not enough to put them in tooltips (*cough* Raycast). Common in games, but wastes space.

- Add a Command Palette. This is the easiest, but it requires mirroring every action, and is suboptimal when you have the same action for each item in a set.

When designing for technical users: all of the above please. But for average users it's less clear. I think there's still room for innovation, both on the software architecture and the UI side.

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