Comment by advis
11 hours ago
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 would submit that the point of the GUI was necessarily "anti-keyboard" as more "pro-discovery", plus adding gestures that would be difficult on a keyboard.
Keyboard interfaces can be, but not necessarily, quite opaque. There's a reason in the old days companies shipped keyboard overlays and function key templates to help users (or went all in with custom keyboards built for the application).
In contrast consider something like Wordstar where you pretty much just needed to memorize the three prefix keys, and if you pressed one and waiting, you'd get a menu describing all of the options.
Obviously, things like early Smalltalk and, probably, Xerox (having never used any of the early Xerox systems), relied heavily on the mouse, but even it had command accelerators.
The CUA standard was that crossover that Windows, and MOTIF, adopted. Much of that work is still with us today, and it worked well both on GUIs and TUIs (witness the old Turbo Pascal/C++ IDEs, and other applications). Those character based applications had to assume there was no mouse, but offer the flexibility of being good citizens should a mouse be present.