alt Hacker NewsGUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
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Command 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.
Yes, for efficiently of course but at the very least for accessibility.
I really like this kind of thing but I wish there were more tutorials to help get good with keyboard shortcuts. vimtutor was lifesaving
This was my point in my comment[0] in that thread. I've used GUI Emacs for years, it's way better than the TUI version and fully keyboard driven.
Interestingly, people have seen my GUI Emacs and commented "I didn't know you could get images in a terminal". Then I have to tell them it's not a terminal...
If I had to pick the absolute worst things about Teams, which is already one of the worst pieces of software ever made, it would be that it's not keyboard driven at all.
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.
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.
Such a funny coincidence. I opened HN in this new, 100%-rust browser[1] I'm working on to actually test some keyboard fixes I did last night.
Every action was keyboard first and only got mouse access later. Browsing by keyboard is not the browser's specific goal, but it was a feature from day 1!
Honestly, they should be keyboard first. Yes, let all the mouse stuff work as normal, but choose keys so that the fastest way to navigate the app is with the keyboard whenever possible.
>But I want to oppose a recurring argument in favor of TUIs that in my opinion does not have a solid foundation. To paraphrase various commenters: TUIs should be preferred because they are keyboard-driven.
Yes. One problem with this argument in particular is that every TUI reinvents the wheel and designs its own schema.
To reinforce author's point, classic GUI frameworks and their guidelines actually provide hotkey schemas for common actions by default, and hot paths for quick interface traversal. They're universal and work by default, so in a lot of cases you don't even need to think about it, only extend it with your own actions. Absolutely nothing prevents you from doing the same in a TUI framework, but at this point the supposed simplicity and flexibility is lost.
New GUIs have other innovations, see for example Microsoft Ribbon that adopted link navigation from Vimperator to make classic toolbars discoverable, compact, accessible from the keyboard, and customizable - all at the same time! Unthinkable for any other UI paradigm.
It's incredible that after the Electron devastation era this unification and keyboard accessibility feels like some kind of lost art, and the perceived lack of keyboard driven GUIs is used a strawman to criticize GUI as a principle. Status quo of "most apps do X" is not the principle. It's also not true, essentially all good GUI apps are keyboard driven, and surely most professional/heavy user ones.
Design good interfaces, not bad ones, regardless of the paradigm. This is harder than it seems, and TUI is not a automatic substitute for your lack of this skill. If you think it is you will design a bad app, in the same way pixel art looks hideous when used to compensate for game designer's laziness. In fact, a lot of recent TUI apps I see are pure terminal cargo cult and are simply worse by being TUIs.
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
Co-sign. This is one of the reasons I’ve always loved NetNewsWire as my RSS reader and few things have been able to displace it. Everything is doable by keyboard, and the keyboard commands are extremely logical and intuitive. You can FLY through your backlog.
Excel is the same way. I’ve been an excel power user as well as a Sheets power user and the latter just never managed to enable the level of speedy keyboard navigation Excel could. I can almost work blindfolded in Excel.
People gave the ribbon interface a lot of shit but one thing they definitely got right was making absolutely every option reachable from some keyboard shortcut. Some of the shortcuts get a little long but you can just add those as a hotkey if you use them a lot.
I agree 100%. The mouse is great and I don't think GUIs should drop it or anything, but it's wonderful to have the ability to keep your hands on your keyboard when doing data entry tasks and the like. I also think that when you design for both keyboard and mouse input, it will force you to consider rough edges of your UI design in a way that you wouldn't have to if you were just designing for one. So the app will be better as a result.
I'm surprised there's only a single mention of tiling window managers here. No talk about i3[0] or hyprland[1]?
I mean these things aren't only highly usable, they're absolutely beautiful[2].
I'll also add that being keyboard driven helps people with disabilities AND makes things easier for AI agents. For exactly the same reason too. It's far easier for programs to hit key codes than try to determine pixel locations on a screen.
As a "power user" I still love TUIs but I also love good GUIs. Why should I be constantly lifting my hand to reach for the mouse? Though one of the big reasons I love living in the terminal is that it is extremely light weight. So many GUIs just eat up your system resources. I don't have that issue with TUIs. FFS, just compare 2 editors: (neo)vim vs Word. And before you say "Word does more" go ahead, add a hundred plugins to vim and then run that test again. vim will still win while also replacing VS Code, Obsidian, and a dozen other applications. The other big reason I love it is portability. Like the author mentions and is discussed in last week's thread, I can jump between machines (even through ssh!) and have no friction. I can have full control of my machine through ssh in a TUI while my mouse jitters while streaming the screen through either ssh or a VNC. I literally have to set different PS1s on my machines because otherwise there's no feedback telling me I'm connecting to something locally vs remotely.
But more importantly, let people do what they want. If you prefer to live in GUIs, do that. If you prefer to live in the terminal, do that. What's great about computers is the choice and flexibility. A big reason I'd support the OP here is that it exclusively adds to that. The ability to program computers and make them do what we, a random user and not an employee at some big tech company, want them to do is what made them take over the world. That even includes smart phones, where no two are alike (you all have different apps). Let's just make good products and let the best ideas flesh out. That's better than just arguing. I don't care if you use emacs, Atom, or program in fucking notepad++. You do you. But as devs we should add flexibility, not put people into boxes.
Why though?
The way we are moving I believe soon we will be talking to the websites not just clicking or typing around...
That title reads like a spoof of hackernews culture
My issue is that taking a strictly GUI driven approach makes you build an application (in the browser presumably) that will require more permissions than you would typically want in the terminal so TUIs win out by being in proximity to those tools (cat, ls, rm, etc) for development use cases
Spin up a Windows 3.11 and later instance to try this out.
yes please ! even AI would appreciate this !
Keyboard 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.
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.
Yes and no. The big advantage of a GUI is having interactive 2D coordinate input support (aka a pointer, or gestures.) While I think a keyboard can be a great control surface, that’s one thing it really lacks and only GUIs really offer. So to enforce that the whole GUI must be keyboard-drivable requires limiting the major advantage of the GUI. I’m a fan of the Emacs or Plan9 styles where the keyboard and pointer are able to be used together synergistically. You also see some of this in tools like video, DAW, and 2D/3D graphical scene editors.
I'm glad the fad of TUIs are dying, I don't get the hype of them.
We just need better, efficient and faster GUIs to put these TUIs to an end.
Take a look at gpgui and glaze leading on this. There should be no reason to use TUIs anymore.
It is time to move on from using this arcane technology from the 60s-70s.
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TUIs are an abomination and most GUIs should just be web.
CLIs should be preferred when available. Learning them pays you back when it's time to write a script or pipe massive amounts of data.
Honestly, it'd be nice if people remembered about keyboard controls more often. I'm not saying it should replace the mouse, but it'd be great if both options were kept around