alt Hacker NewsGUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
Comments
Jump navigation is a nice way to solve this. Something like FlashJump for Mac. Tab navigation too for close proximity jumping.
A few years back I started to try to use my computer by not touching the mouse. Ended up writing a bunch of Tampermonkey scripts for my most used web pages to add fast keyboard navigation shortcuts.
Also a lot of webpages have it already built in, by pressing "?" they show a nice overlay. For example github and gmail have it.
For github I still ended up adding a quite a few more shortcuts.
And tablets should have a "direct touch only, all options present mode" (no long-presses, no drags, no drags from edge, no swipes." It would really improve accessibility.
> The takeaway is simple. Do not compromise on the user experience you provide with your application
Same thing I hear from everyone.
"You can't compromise on UX" - UX experts.
"You can't compromise on security" - Security experts.
"You can't compromise on Accessibility" - a11y experts.
We gotta make trade-offs, and I gotta get my thing shipped (for me I learn toward security for my service)
Shortcat.app fills some of this gap.
I still haven't found generic solutions to selecting and copy-pasting text using the keyboard only though, when the text is not in a textbox/area.
I had used a vim-like plugin in firefox that let you do that somewhat, but nothing OS level.
The one UI invention many web UIs now add is the universal command search bar. I’m most familiar from it from Jetbrains IDEs where it’s been for over a decade and it is a remarkable upgrade on browsing menus. With the KeyPromoter extension on I even learned the keyboard shortcut over time. Good UI pattern and now this universal command search is everywhere: Cloudflare, Mercury, etc.
Love it.
I think we should also be finding ways to make things keyboard-driven that currently require a mouse. My side project is a keyboard centric flowchart editor which tries to merge the two between something typically 2D with pixel coordinates (normal flowchart software) and fitting it into a grid that has discrete coords so you can navigate with arrow keys.
I'm a keyboard based UI lover, but I wonder if the supportive crowd is, and will ever, be too small.
Even crude AS400 days keyboard UIs were beyond nice. But then if people want to try and replicate emacs keymaps or vi command composition, better for the dozens of us. ^^
It is excellent when I can do common tasks in an application without taking my hands off the keyboard. Especially utility apps like a calculator or password manager that I usually just need for a few seconds.
Bitwarden used to be keyboard friendly, but recent updates have removed those functions for reasons I can’t understand.
I do agree to some extent, but were GUIs not made specifically to reduce so much reliance on the keyboard? And a few people here did mention that this "fully keyboard-driven" workflow would probably be used by power users primarily.
Like anything else in life, I think there's no single answer to this.
But for people interested in seeing the difference between mouse-driven vs keyboard-driven flows while web browsing, check out the Vimium extension. It made my sentiments very much favour keyboard-driven workflows
I've thought how i dislike both keyboard and mouse navigation from an ergonomics standpoint. Fine motor control for hours. I'd low-key want a neuralink beacuse speech is too awkward. Maybe mixed with eye monitoring.
Adding keyboard support gets very annoying after a while. I recently posted a new version a package I made that makes it really simple to add keyboard shortcuts to javascript apps: keyboardist.io
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.
fully keyboard-driven is a high bar, I'd settle for prioritizing the most common actions for keyboard shortcuts.
I would love a return to function keys. You get 12, make 'em count.
Hacker browser: allows to navigate browsers without ever needing to use the mouse.
I highly recommend it, it's such a productivity booster
This is something Windows and Mac OS got right in the 1990s. I remember reading specifically about it in terms of digital accessibility too at the time.
It used to annoy me that on Windows I could press ENTER to close a message box, but on Mac I had to reach for the mouse.
There is much more to it.
For me personally it goes I like TUI/CMD for things I use as a daily driver, I know what I want to accomplish I know exactly what movements to do and clicking GUI items is just too slow.
Then there are GUI things that I don't use that often I need some kind of map, I don't to "read the fucking manual" every 3 months when I use it and I barely remember, but if I see it in GUI my memory will kick in. It also works for most new things better than TUI/CMD because for a new tool I don't want to invest my focus, I just want to find out how to be done with my things or just learn what it is, reading manual is not fastest way, fastest way is clicking around.
Nowadays we have 3rd mode namely "chat interface" I can just chat with whatever bot is integrated in the app or just chat with the bot to use the application for me. Command line utilities work like charm in that mode I can accomplish a lot by asking vague stuff to a bot that will make stuff for me in a ways I don't even have to know how or what.
But I do believe final form of interface is not "chat interface" alone. I do believe what Karpathy already outlined, that there will be specific interfaces for systems that will use GUI elements to make it clear for the user what is going on and will be faster to clear the information to the user instead of having user to read back text.
This guy is gonna love OMARCHY
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.
No. GUIs exist across a spectrum of form factors and use cases, many of which would be terrible with a keyboard.
I agree completely and that’s exactly what I did for my site:
I really like this kind of thing but I wish there were more tutorials to help get good with keyboard shortcuts. vimtutor was lifesaving
I agree, it's bad if like your mouse isn't working and you need to use a app that only works with a mouse
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!
For people who want to navigate browsers only with the keyboard, I recommend vimium https://vimium.github.io/
It's a plugin that enables many keyboard shortcuts, so that you almost don't need to touch the mouse to navigate.
For me, it's such a productivity booster, especially the ability to navigate links without pointing at them to click
I miss Windows 98/XP and its fully keyboard driven UIs
Yes, for efficiently of course but at the very least for accessibility.
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.
>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.
In the latest app my company is working on, we deliberately wanted to support usage over SSH.
We basically designed the app as a TUI, but implemented mouse events so you can also drive it like a GUI.
When we hit the limits of the terminal (couldn’t register the app as a DWM window and throw up separate windowed modals etc) we forked and extended ghosttty.
Now it also supports mouse hover events, DWM popups, and a bunch of other good stuff. We plan to add icons next.
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 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.
Someone explain this to Apple
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.
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
I quite literally cannot remember anything I've ever read as simple and correct, on the topic of UX/UI as this.
I tend to deride UX/UI as almost a joke because it nearly never understands that fashion and science are different things.
This one gets it.
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.
to a man with an LLM everything looks like a nail
Why though?
The way we are moving I believe soon we will be talking to the websites not just clicking or typing around...
I am sad to see what happened with GTK. It seems gtk2 was the last good GTK version. Then it went downhill from there.
No.
yes please ! even AI would appreciate this !
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.
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.
Well said. Now I just need a universal way to maintain consistency of my F-keys across all applications, including various browsers.
I've been on this kick for a long time. A few years ago I was exploring a UI design tool that was entirely keyboard-driven, using pneumonic keychords inspired by Vim: https://github.com/danielvaughn/stride
My experience is that while it's awesome to have really deep keyboard-driven experience, it can't _only_ be that. You need some graphical controls to help guide users.