alt Hacker NewsPower 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 corny.
(This reads harsher than I intended. Sorry about that. I love Arch Linux people. It's just think it's no less noble to serve the average Joe than to create the perfect tool for power users.)
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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.
No honestly some harshness is warranted, most of the people alive have internet access and a smartphone, this is a more ubiquitous activity than many others we require or expect accommodations from. This site has a lot of good to offer, but sometimes the bubble needs a reality check that their needs and concerns are even more niche than disabilities like Blindness.
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.
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 nothing.
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 from 25 years ago could be navigated at light speed.
That's part of the reason Excel can't be dethroned. Excel is from the old age of software, and that means that users can input and navigate at light speed. All these fancy tools claim to dethrone Excel, but when you actually use them you realize it's a goo goo ga ga Fisher Price level UI. Extreme amounts of whitespace, buttons hidden behind submenus of submenus (which you have to navigate by eye, by the way!), features stripped, UI constantly shuffling around between updates.
Look, that works fine for a website on the open web where you assume your users have never touched a computer before. That does not work for commercial software.