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brudgerslast Saturday at 8:27 PM1 replyview on HN

In a Turing machine theory, a GUI application can do all the same things a terminal application can do.

In practical design, GUI applications inevitably deprecate keyboard abstractions in favor of graphical abstractions and graphical abstractions require parsing visual representations and are less conducive to "muscle memory" whenever pointer control is relative rather than absolute (which these days is approximately always [1]).

Keyboard oriented applications feel more like a language and human brains tend to map well to language and touch typing while GUI's rely on something akin (or identical) to hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is harder than touch typing and every GUI application requires developing a unique mental model.

[1] in the ancient days of digitizing tablets with absolute coordinates, it was possible to "touch mouse." But that's not how we do things today (and it would not work well with infinite scrolling, etc.)


Replies

doubled112last Saturday at 9:19 PM

I happily used a small Wacom graphics tablet as a mouse for a long time. Thanks for the memories, I’d nearly forgotten.