alt Hacker NewsGUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
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Keyboard accessibility is one of those things that tends to get swept under the rug or forgotten about entirely alongside accessibility in general. The funny thing is that the former usually falls out of the latter.
Part of the blame lands on the shoulders of popular UI frameworks (or in the case of those choosing to eschew use of such, the developers who made that choice). The older frameworks tend to make this fairly easy; for example, in Cocoa/AppKit (Mac native UI framework), one can pretty easily wire up their entire UI for proper keyboard navigation entirely visually (mostly just consists of connecting nextKeyView outlet between controls to produce a logical chain to tab-focus through). Defining key shortcuts is also simple; add a menu item for a command and set its corresponding shortcut (which in turn allows the user to rebind the shortcut in System Settings at will).
That sort of design has fallen out of favor with newer frameworks, unfortunately. The new preferred style seems to be a wireframe that the dev chooses which parts fill in, and often only the barest of essentials makes the cut.
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 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.)
I think the main reason people prefer TUI are certain assumptions that come with it. Like I assume a TUI runs on vim like shortcuts, allowing me to move with hjkl. It isn't the case everywhere, but it's what I have observed mostly.
When a software is created for the terminal, it can expect the users to know these certain shortcuts. But this cannot be assured for GUI.
What does it mean though for a GUI to be keyboard-driven? The obvious way is that every action simply gets a shortcut assigned. My counter would be that that is not really keyboard-driven, but merely keyboard-compatible.There is the issue of discoverability. The best practice right now seems to display the shortcuts of buttons in tooltips, menu items, or when pressing a different shortcut. I’d content that buttons are a fundamental mismatch with keyboards. A keyboard driven UI shouldn’t have buttons. The issue is that genuinely keyboard driven UIs like CLI or TUI suffer terrible discoverability that being the reason that mouse driven UI exists in the first place. So can we have a keyboard-driven UI that is as intuitive as clicking with a mouse?
I don't know if it's OSX itself or one of the common GUI engines implementations on OSX, but I notice a lot of apps (including Firefox when you try to save a file which would overwrite another file) will have popup modals with multiple buttons and there's no way to click the non-default button with just keyboard.
For example, in Firefox, trying to save a file when a file by that name already exists, you get a "Cancel" or "Replace" prompt and you can "Cancel" by pressing return, but if you want to "Replace", you apparently HAVE to use mouse or trackpad!?!
ALT+TAB, TAB, ↓, ↓, ↓, CTRL+HOME.
For a lot of people this is a recognizable pattern. Switch window, select element, scroll down, then snap back to the very top. The keyboard commands above should do the same thing no matter if it's your text editor or your web browser. People should know these are going to work regardless of what they're using. Because these aren't key commands going to the program, these are key commands going to the operating system. The program shouldn't be able to arbitrarily choose whether it abides by these. Consistency is important not only for speed, but for human understanding and capability. If every door had a different way of opening it such as drawing a series of lines or tapping a certain rhythm or belching thirty feet away people would be mentally taxed discovering that particular door's interfacing method, and common tools would not be able to help those who couldn't find the interface or use it because of disability or differing ability. It's only doors with extremely specialized designs like blast doors that have an unusual interface and interfacing method, because they're designed to do one very specific thing that lies far outside of common use cases. Your chatroom program, image viewer, or archive unpacker is not a blast door. Put a door handle on it where everyone expects it to be.
I agree but I think being usable by the keyboard isn't enough, because the shortcuts are often hard to discover and remember. I think the ideal is - like good TUIs - GUIs should put obvious hints on screen how to navigate via keyboard.
It would be really great to have some GUI frameworks for the common platforms (including web!) designed to do this and have some opinions on common shortcuts for common actions so we can standardize on something.
last time i built a crud app (oh maybe about 24 years ago) i made it a point to do this. i remember watching the payroll people fly through their terminal mode vax vms applications with such speed and dexterity that it would make any unix admin well versed in the art of the command line blush and it made me think "oh yeah, all these 90s point and click guis got it all wrong. if people are required to make heavy use of a system at work, they would prefer a learning curve followed by speed, comfort and dexterity over an easier learning curve that trades dexterity for discoverability."
it was a webapp framework, but... all browsing/listing screens included row ids and a focused text box- so that typing the row id and enter would select. all action buttons had an underline to signify which ctrl-shift hotkey triggered them. all edit screens defaulted focus to the first editable textbox and at no time was the mouse actually necessary. finally, load times were optimized to target 75ms.
amusingly, the user feedback was "the keyboard control is pretty good but can you please make it faster."
what i thought was chrome ended up being critical to the users not being miserable.
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.
Sadly, even interfaces that do support keyboard navigation tend to implement it poorly. Microsoft Office is probably the gold standard here, almost everything can be navigated using mnemonics, all keypresses are buffered and the user seldom needs more than 5 presses to get anywhere.
I wish that every app had the StarCraft system where the letter to press a button is indicated. Like:
- New *G*ame - *S*ettings - *Q*uit
Ideally keys should be centered around an area of the keyboard and not just the first letter.
> In fact, many GUI framework application guidelines explicitly encourage GUI application developers
Instead they should be engineered in a way that allows users to bypass those developers in a (at least) framework-consistent way as there will never be a time when they collectively become "keyboard-wise".
I mean like the original article, I gotta say, Tabs vs Spaces.
I just prefer TUIs, I think if you prefer GUIs you should very much use them and ask for more of them, but if you prefer TUIs please do use those too. I could go into all the reasons I prefer TUIs but this is a HN comment not a manifesto.
Please just use and develop what you prefer.
> While it’s true that if you randomly pick a GUI and a TUI application, the latter is more probable to be fully keyboard-driven, this does not tip the scale in favor of developing TUIs over GUIs3. What it does is highlight the inadequacies of keyboard navigation in many GUI applications.
Something to consider is a terminal that has keyboard navigation of its own. Through a terminal shortcut, I can move the cursor at will and copy any text at all, even if it's part of the interface of a TUI. If I want to copy the filepath of the file I'm working on in vim to then use in a shell, for example, it takes like 5 keys to copy it straight off vim's statusbar. A graphical text editor can display the filepath in a tab or something, but I can't copy the text off the tab.
I don't know if I'm alone in this, but it's very frustrating to want a piece text, see it in front of you, and you can't copy it because the developer for one reason or another didn't implement copying of that text, so you have to type it out even if it's right there.
Sometimes it seems on purpose too. For example, when a game on Steam gets updated terms of use, you get presented with a window showing the terms, but you can't copy them to save them. It's like the purpose is to just accept and forget the terms. A TUI can't prevent the user from copying text by its very nature.
Any terminal can implement this kind of arbitrary-text keyboard navigation on its own and have it work for all TUIs. Were e.g. GTK to implement something like this, it would only work for GTK apps, not for all GUI apps. This is exclusive of TUIs because TUIs are text-driven while GUIs are pixel-driven.
Couldn't agree more, but I think it's majorly a "geek" thing. I'm using i3 on my personal linux and aerospace on my work mac ; vimium in the browser, Neru on the other apps (does something similar to Neru). I recently ended up finding a way to create user-scripts for electron app and since then I'm adding vimium-esque extensions (e.g. in Teams) wherever I go.
I wish this was a default, but also that there was more of a standard to navigate UIs. That's why I really like vimium and other similar extensions, it's following the vi logic across websites, rather than having to learn everyone's idea of how to navigate.
reasonably sound and soundly reasonable :)
"Just as it should be possible to perform every action with a pointing device, every action should also be possible with the keyboard."
"It should be possible to move around and interact with every part of your user interface using the keyboard."
Yes, finally. It works both ways; when I have hold of the mouse, I don't want to reach for the keyboard, and vice versa. Windows has had this problem for ages, and probably always will. There are some workarounds, "ctrl-esc" (I do this all the time) and "windows-button", but some of them require really jumping through hoops.
I moved to KDE from Gnome for a variety of reasons, but I genuinely miss Gnome and Native GTK apps. They weren't as customizable, but the features you did get work so well.
One of my main issues with KDE is that the default keybindings for desktop operations feel like they were designed by people who don't navigate their desktop with a keyboard.
Then there are little things like in Gnome the screenshot implicitly copies to the clipboard, while in KDE you have to click the copy button. There are just little points of friction I experience in KDE that make me yearn for Gnome's workflow. I think my ideal world I would have a KDE desktop that used all the Gnome shortcuts, and worked more like Gnome.
I recently had a revelation when I made an extended qwerty midi controller app that permanently shows the states and functions of all keys including when modifiers are held.
It occurred to me that this is a wonderful way to design software: you immediately know the keyboard shortcuts because you’re already looking at them. I’m working on taking what I’ve built for the qwerty midi keyboard controller (which is built on hammerspoon) and making it just a generic interface for any kind of app.
If the end goal is navigating and controlling the app via keyboard shortcuts, so why not bake that into the design of the GUI itself?
My project if you’re curious: https://github.com/mattdanielmurphy/qwerty-midi-hammerspoon
This is a very narrow viewpoint, considering the majority of computing is done on touch screens now. Sometimes keyboard controls are critical, sometimes they're not, sometimes your users don't care, sometimes they do. Sometimes a pointer is a better human interface for something, sometimes a purpose built controller is, sometimes a multi touch sensitive touchpad is. I wouldn't make an FPS that was just keyboard controls and the same is true of some other types of UIs. Just measure it and be creative and empathetic to how people will use your product who aren't like you and consider the physical interactions as a part of your design space and not just the software.
Mildly off topic, but getting to the original GUI vs TUI debate: Speed can also be a factor. I've yet to find a GUI file manager that is better than Midnight Commander/Far. I think there are some graphical orthodox file managers, but I could never do things as quickly in them as I could in mc.
So sure, add keyboard support to the GUIs. That's always a good thing. Just make sure they're also as responsive as in a TUI. Dialogs should appear instantly, etc.
The other headaches I've had with GUIs (in Linux) is the appearance can change if an underlying library changes. Even if I haven't upgraded the SW, if I upgrade one of the toolkits it relies on the app's appearance and behavior can change.
Somehow this is never an issue with TUIs.
TUIs should be fully mouse-driven
Three levels of GUI workflow operation: touchpad < mouse < keyboard. This is the main reason people fall in love with programs like vim: with enough experience it allows one to completely eliminate interface friction.
I work for a company that for years has had a very old-school, terminal style POS. Lots of key shortcuts. Like, black/white text terminal POS.
The folks who learn how to use it well navigate through it faster than the system can process their inputs.
The new system has lots of fancy GUI, but is slower, and the folks used to their shortcuts hate it. But it's so much faster to train people to use.
Agreed, but what "prevents" it is that making a good keyboard-driven UI takes a lot of taste, extra effort to build it, and it must be revisited any time the UI changes. It's duplicated work.
Ideally all GUIs/TUIs are usable with keyboard and mouse independently.
A good example of this is when you have a fancy keyboard-driven workflow yet you can't even do the most trivial task without placing two hands on your keyboard. Sometimes I just want to reach over and do it with one hand on the trackpad.
At this point what keeps me on Firefox is less the browser engine diversity than [tridactyl](https://tridactyl.xyz/), without which I feel almost helpless in a browser.
Where possible, there should be keyboard shortcuts/navigation.
Where appropriate, the labeling of fields and so forth should be such that it will work for a screen reader.
Often, the expedient option is to use an HTML front-end so that one can off-load most of that to the user's selection of web-browser (and where possible, things should be engineered so that Lynx is a valid option).
That said, I use OneNote and Macromedia Freehand and so forth w/ a stylus --- horses for courses.
One of the pieces of software I sell is motorsports timing software [0], it has a GUI for newbs, but at the bottom of every window is a little bar that shows the list of shortcuts. People pick them up quickly!
And it's auto generated from the UI code. It still surprises me how many people just prefer the mouse anyway, though. But the option is there!
Worth noting that Windows 3.x Paint could be used entirely from the keyboard, as the arrow keys moved the cursor and you could position it with pixel-precision. This is in addition to the fact that the rest of the OS was also entirely usable without a mouse.
Given Bloomberg Terminal's success, and all the IBM terminals at warehouses and big stores - this is more than apparent. But only few understand UI to design it right.
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.
I am kind of obsessed with keyboard shortcuts, ever since discovering Vim a million years ago. The Vim shortcuts are burned into my brain.
I've found that that itch is pretty much entirely solved by Sway (especially since it supports modal navigation, which I have become pretty addicted to), but honestly I actually found Gnome Shell (as of about ~2 years ago) pretty keyboard friendly. Hitting the Windows key [1] brings up the global search and that worked to launch stuff, moving between workspaces worked ok. I know it's popular to hate on Gnome 3 and beyond but honestly I rather liked it.
[1] Or whatever the official name for it is; it's a Windows logo on my keyboard.
Relatedly, I think that GUI frameworks should make it easier to make your app fully keyboard driven. But my experience with making GUIs is that it seems harder than necessary to make an efficient keyboard-driven interface.
And it should also be easy to make the keyboard controls customizable.
So it's the opposite of smartphone, where keyboards are UI driven
On the web, keyboard accessible web UIs are a WCAG 2.1.1 level A requirement - that's literally the most basic level of accessibility standard (unless you count 'failed' as a level). If your website / web app isn't achieving that then you haven't tried very hard.
Besides JavaFX[1] are there any free, open-source, object-oriented, event-driven, cross-platform, native GUI frameworks that allow for keyboard-accessible UIs? Preferably using a modern language such as Go.
When I developed KeenWrite[2] over 12 years ago, I chose JavaFX because it was (a) bundled with Java; and (b) ran on Linux, Mac, and Windows. JavaFX was later ripped out of Java, to my chagrin, forcing a number of technical contortions.
[1]: Not free on Windows due to Microsoft's $500 cert signing process.
Modern Computer keyboard is one of the best and most brilliant piece of ui ever invented.
Far beyond mouse, stylus wich are themselves infinitely superior to touchscreen.
The mouse is amazing, if you have a good sensor, a mousepad and no mouse acceleration. Not many have this setup, but those who do can wield their cursor with insane speed and accuracy. Consider top osu! or Starcraft players.
Yeah I would rather just have a single interface(the terminal) for all of the tools that I use that are keyboard driven by default. There isn't anything I need from a GUI that the terminal doesn't give me.
I also can't cleanly nest and stack GUI applications in tmux like I can with TUI programs. I think GUIs are for the most part tailored towards non-power users unless its something like video editing or 3d modeling that is aimed more towards professionals
I use Vimium [0] for this very reason -- highly recommend it! Although admittedly this only solves for a fully keyboard-driven _browser_ experience.
Back in the early 1990s, mice were fragile enough that Apollo salespeople were trained to be able to do their demos keyboard-only as backup (at least for tradeshows) and that was just generally how interfaces were built. It wasn't an accessibility thing, it was a "we're demoing expensive systems to even more expensive people, it had better work" thing...
yes totally agree. I build macOS apps and found out that not every apps support this. One of the reason people buy my file search app https://www.fileminutes.com/ is, it is fully keyboard driven. I'm trying the same with my new AI chat app https://www.vinaa.ai/
I'll go one step further: anything you can do in a GUI should also be possible to do through a CLI and yes, also with code libraries. If webapps have n-tier architectures, then so should GUI software.
(we can lie and say that this is to support AI, in actuality it's to have proper programmatic automation and support for custom interfaces instead of GUI apps being black boxes)
I love TUIs.
I move much faster when I don't have to take my hands off the keys to nudge the rat.
However, I don't think my preference for TUIs is about my efficiency. The most important reason I love TUIs is that they generally only have a base set of features needed to get the job done. Most GUIs go off the rails, implementing features for use cases few people have. TUIs tend to be small, fast, and focus on a small use case.
So even though I started out claiming I love TUIs, what I really love is small software: CLI > TUI > GUI.
Keyboard driven is fine, when you have a keyboard. But many users are now on phones or tablets, with a severely limited keyboard that takes a big part of the screen. But they have a variety of gestures that regular desktop machines don't have. A good UI should happily handle both of these extremes, and everything in between.
A GUI is indeed superior to a TUI. And keyboard driven should be both. But neither is my preferred UI. I want CLI programs callable from my shell.
This way I can quickly repeat an action from the past. I get a history of commands inserted. _And_ I can bind my own keyboard shortcuts if necessary. TUI and GUI do not meet this level of platform independence.
If a tool is TUI only I will not adapt it. That's not the case with a GUI, though.
I have seen more GUIs these days that don't support even the bare minimum of using tab to cycle through various fields and selector buttons. Which as I recall was introduced in like windows 3.0.
TUI, GUI.. we need a marriage of both, with configurable levels of integration, which controls to favour TUI or GUI. If it's well done, no need for a mouse, but nice and easy to have. Add to this a thin glove checking for certain movement patterns when the user is not typing and voice to set certain things - all at once.
Jump navigation is a nice way to solve this. Something like FlashJump for Mac. Tab navigation too for close proximity jumping.
I work on ADA a lot for my company. Please put on some headphones, turn on the voice assistant of your OS, put on some blinders, and run your app or website… no mouse, just keyboard.
1. Democracy is about access; make sure everyone has access to your software. 2. The keyboard allows folks with disabilities and power users to fly through your website/app… that being said… the second a tab is off, the person with a disability flies into a wall.