Comment by egypturnash
6 hours ago
> We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode.
GUIs can have keyboard shortcuts too. I'm an artist and I work two-handed: right hand moves the stylus around the screen, left hand floats around the keyboard and changes tools, summons control panels, etc. Whenever I try a different program than the one I'm used to, and have to poke at icons with my right hand because I don't know its shortcuts, I feel like half my brain's idling.
You see this a lot with videos editors. A professional video editor flies around in their software of choice like an sales person in a TUI. Both are inherently proficient with their tool, to the extend that it's hard to graps what's actually happening on screen. We also see this with editors and IDE. Some people cruise around Emacs or Vim, while other hit a few keys and Visual Studio or IntelliJ will refactor 500 lines of code in an instant.
The TUIs are a little funny, because often people can navigate and input faster than the program can render. So you vaguely see a screen change, a menu move or an overlay pop up, only to instantly disappear. The user doesn't need to know what's happening on screen, because they trust their fingers and the system to do the right thing.
> The TUIs are a little funny, because often people can navigate and input faster than the program can render. So you vaguely see a screen change, a menu move or an overlay pop up, only to instantly disappear. The user doesn't need to know what's happening on screen, because they trust their fingers and the system to do the right thing.
I learned this while creating some autohotkey scripts: I could have the macro click before the button was shown on the screen.
This also created some problems where users would unintentionally hit their scroll wheel after clicking and change a 1 to a 7 on the next screen before it even appeared. That wasn’t good…
> The TUIs are a little funny, because often people can navigate and input faster than the program can render.
Yes, but the it's not due to slow rendering speed. GUIs render even slower.
Movie editors are as persnickety about their editing software as we are about ours, it turns out, for many of the same reasons: we accumulate years of proficiency with a tool and don't want to have to retrain in something else without a clear head-and-shoulders advantage.
We solved this with mnemonics (underlined letter is the shortcut) but then got rid of them for some reason
I love the system in Autodesk Animator (now: https://github.com/AnimatorPro). Every menu item or button currently on the screen always have a unique initial letter. There is no need to highlight or underline anything. Amazingly this was done without having to use any too obscure labels (but I doubt it would be fun to try to translate it to other languages). Almost every function is two or three single letter key-presses away, and after using the application for a while you will have memorized more and more of those.
Some frequently used functions have their own special single-key shortcuts as well, so instead of having to press C-P (to open the Clip menu and then select Paste) you can just press the ' key, saving the user a key-press every time they do that.
Oh yeah - AutoCAD by Autodesk was also like this. Once you memorized the keystrokes, you could fly through your line drawing.
I recently rediscovered that I can do GUI menu things on the keyboard in apps like VLC. Feels like a magic trick -- the best of both worlds. Was it the move to phones that did it? Or did most people not use alt shortcuts?