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- Hacker News
- > 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.
by jolmg - And it's not just for websites.
Analogy: the doorframe is of a standard width so that a wheelchair can get through. This means manufacturers can make equipment that will fit in your house without calling you first! You never have to worry you bought a new refrigerator that needs to be pulled into a hole in the roof because it won't fit through the door. You never have to worry about delivering food to a grocer because your hand truck and boxes will fit, and there is a ramp instead of oddly shaped stairs. Nobody needs to be in a wheelchair for this.
by timnetworks - 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.
by marklar423 - 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?by YmiYugy
- 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.)
by manlymuppet - It's so weird for me to live through software evolution to the point where this no longer goes without saying.
In the Windows 3.1 days, it was nearly impossible to make a program that wasn't fully keyboard-usable. Even if you left out all the hotkeys in the menus and messed up the tab order, it was still possible (even if annoying) to get through it with the keyboard, and adding the hotkeys (as well as actual shortcuts) and setting a sensible tab order was super easy and straightforward.
Nowadays more than half of all software is made using non-native GUI toolkits (or sometimes no toolkits at all) that refuse to implement any of the typical keyboard navigation that would previously have come for free.
The keyboard makes computers a joy to use for me. Seeing it disappear makes me very sad. Seeing how the vast majority of people don't care that it disappeared makes me feel like an alien from another planet.
by Timwi - 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.
- 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.
by rootedbox