alt Hacker NewsI find it interesting that people still build and like TUIs that have menus and buttons. Trying to stuff a 1980s windowing paradigm into a terminal just seems odd to me. I never really liked the Borland interface. The article says that menus provide discoverability without having to read a manual, which is true, but at a cost of a whole line of precious text in the term and multiple keystrokes with modifiers to open the menu. Seems like a help key with a pop-up overlay could give you just as much discoverability. Anyway these Borland-style TUIs just keep hanging around. IMO, better to embrace something more like Emacs with built-in help.
There are plenty of examples where menu display and help texts can be toggled.
For example, aptitude has `Aptitude::UI::Menubar-Autohide` and midnight commander has options in the layout menu to disable menu/buttons/etc. That way beginners get to learn through discovery, and may later choose to switch to calling the menu/action with a keypress. Both of those respond to "standard" F1 for help too.
Would I prefer emacs M-x and C-h style interaction in mc? Yeah, probably. I'm used to it everywhere else(such as zsh). However, as a long term user I can execute basically all the functions even though I've long since disabled the buttons, menus and hints.