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.)

Where this falls apart is commercial software. The issue is we use off-the-shelf frameworks and tools for commercial software. And then we don't train developers on how to write high-volume software.

Commercial software is THE power user use case. Your users will be using your software 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. And still, the software is obtuse point-and-click garbage. Meanwhile commercial software from 25 years ago could be navigated at light speed.

That's part of the reason Excel can't be dethroned. Excel is from the old age of software, and that means that users can input and navigate at light speed. All these fancy tools claim to dethrone Excel, but when you actually use them you realize it's a goo goo ga ga Fisher Price level UI. Extreme amounts of whitespace, buttons hidden behind submenus of submenus (which you have to navigate by eye, by the way!), features stripped, UI constantly shuffling around between updates.

Look, that works fine for a website on the open web where you assume your users have never touched a computer before. That does not work for commercial software.

The argument is that both should be supported, which seems like a valid wish. There's really no reason to either-or this. Just have both work.

In some cases you may need the keyboard accessibility.

- Your mouse/trackpad breaks or isn't recognized?

- The right mouse button for your trackpad isn't working for some reason (e.g. you spilled a drink on it). It should still be possible to use the context menu keyboard button to bring up the context menu.

- Your hands are on the keyboard (typing a document, email, code, etc.) and it slows you down to move to the mouse/trackpad to perform an operation such as copying/pasting text or bringing up the spell checker context menu actions so you want to do those with the keyboard to keep yourself in the flow.

Most often you'll learn keyboard shortcuts/interactions for your workflow then expand out as and when you need them. Sure, knowing all shortcuts and interactions is fairly limited, but the majority of people will know how to cut/copy/paste with the keyboard as those are common operations.

Whoa there.

Allowing people to use keyboard is NOT the same as forcing people to use keyboard.

Also, very few users will use only the keyboard, but quite many will use some part of keyboard access. If today I need to switch between proofreading languages a lot, you bet I will learn the keyboard shortcut for it (and forget day after that, until next time I needit again)

> But most people aren’t willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs.

Keyboard shortcuts should be an _optional_ way to interact for accessibility and power users! They should never be required!

This is what TUIs get wrong, they make it the required way to navigate and often don’t even let you use the mouse.

FWIW, I think it's a blind spot to think of power users as "Arch Linux people" using "developer tooling".

My wife is a UX Design consultant and she had an engagement where a bunch of state government accountants were bemoaning how a redesigned procurement platform took away all their keyboard shortcuts.

It really is not so much about keyboard vs. mouse - power users vs. average Joes. That all is just a discombobulation that distracts from the main issue and the issue is the accessibility of plain text.

Majority of computer professionals (programmers included) come to appreciate a single fundamental truth about their field way too late into their careers. That the most basic foundational unit, the substrate they need to conquer is text. Everything stems from it. We have to deal with text our entire lives. It doesn't matter where that text appears - in web browsers, in Jira, in Slack, in terminal, in PDFs, Word or LaTeX documents. Code by the way is just structured text. The feeling of empowerment and liberation when you can deal with text on your own terms is a disproportionate multiplier. That's why using multiple cursors feature for the first time feels so amazing, even though the practical cases for it are not that common.

And when I say "text", I don't only describe the process of "grabbing some text" and "piping it" into another process, or manipulating it. It's not only about the input, the act of consuming text is equally, if not more important.

We argue that keyboard-driven UIs are more efficient for the input, but hundreds of memorized shortcuts can't really fix the fundamental problem.

Vendors are designed to own you and ownership can take different forms. Slack app that doesn't let you easily extract code snippets from a thread - owns you. Jira that forces you to use their stupid, quirky wysiwyg editor - owns you. Note-taking app that keeps the data on the cloud ain't your friend. The friction is the ownership. When extraction of text requires effort, the tool has leverage over you. It's a subtler form than data lock-in, it is behavioral lock-in. You adapt your workflow to what the tool makes easy, and gradually the tool's affordances shape what you even think to do. Information gets buried in threads, search is mediocre, export is hostile. The "solution" they offer is to stay there longer - search in Slack, link to Slack, screenshare in Slack, summarize with AI in Slack, don't ever leave Slack. The tool becomes the answer to the problems the tool creates.

And when you get to that point, you'd feel helpless - all your knowledge and muscle memory can't help you there - not only the app is not favoring power-user experience, it's forcing everyone downgrade to the "average Joe" levels.

Most popular editors and IDEs don't give you direct leverage over plain text either, at least not without the effort from your side. Shortcuts, popups, UI elements in the IDE at best are local drivers - you can't easily grab a thing from the outside and feed it to your LLM context in the middle of a task, or insert within a comment in the code - you have to switch, copy, paste, deal with format inconsistencies, manual conversion, etc. Then we keep bargaining what method is the best, fastest and most convenient - using the mouse or keeping the fingers on the home row, modality or complex shortcuts. All for the sake of the problem that's artificially enforced on our workflows.

Terminal-heavy users eventually start appreciating the leverage Unix philosophy grants them over text, but that's still contained within locality, they still have to constantly jump around, while eventually figuring out ways for automating some aspects of it.

Point is - do not give in to the status quo. Liberate your text - deal with it on your terms. Get annoyed whenever you need to switch back and forth just for the sake of finding the piece you need and moving it around - it should be instantaneous and instinctual. Like a boxer moving in a ring and casually throwing heavy punches. Long-time Vim and Emacs users "get it", even though they often don't follow through - some things just never become gratifying instincts. Sometimes, even the opposite forms - like redundant muscle memories. Some outright would reject using a new app because it messes with one shortcut they keep accidentally pressing. Sometimes, I wish there was an agreed standard for every UI - to have only the core, commonly used keys pre-set, while making everything else configurable.

I don't know where you got "forcing" here. The author is arguing for guis that give the option of keyboard use. Unless you think having hot keys underlined nonconsensually imposes visual complexity and confusion on the hapless non-power-user, I don't see where your argument makes sense here.

Eh I think things like vimium have kinda solved this.

Push a button, every icon is now labeled with a key, type that key, counts as a click, done.

I get that this does NOT solve for say, someone who's blind (i guess you could announce them, not sure), but it is easy enough I've found even lower tech people are fine with it.

As always, a lot of the trick is communicating the interface and using modern standards, not "Well it's ctrl + insert because that's what it is on linux"

Power user experience is not the same across disciplines either.

God forbid I should ever be forced to use Blender or Inkscape with only buttons.

you are arguing against a strawman.

Most reasonable people want support for both keyboard and mouse-based navigation. For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use?

Same with some web forms where hitting enter in a text box does nothing. I expect it to submit a form, but very often, it does nothing.

No honestly some harshness is warranted, most of the people alive have internet access and a smartphone, this is a more ubiquitous activity than many others we require or expect accommodations from. This site has a lot of good to offer, but sometimes the bubble needs a reality check that their needs and concerns are even more niche than disabilities like Blindness.