Comment by scholia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scholia | Hacker News Reader

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> The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now)

Use the Alt key.

For example, open Word and press Alt to show the keyboard commands. If you want the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press H as shown.

Alternatively, to open the Ribbon and show the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press Alt-H.

So, if you want to center some selected text in Word, press Alt, H, then AC

If you want to insert an image, press Alt, N, P and so on.

The Ribbon makes Office programs much easier to use, so you probably won't want to learn many of these key sequences. However, the ones you already know will almost certainly work.

For the record, I much prefer Windows 10. However, the fact is that Apple doesn't sell any of the hardware I use. It doesn't make a proper tower desktop and it doesn't make a small rotating-screen laptop that doubles as a touch tablet.

Even if I was willing to compromise on hardware, less-functional Apple products would cost 2x to 4x more.

As I wrote I still do consider keyboard UI on windows the best, because it's AFAIK the only widely supported destop OS with full keyboard control of the GUI. But the Ribbons are not for me - it's a menu system that's also trying to be a context aware palette, which makes it worse than either a classic menu (easy to skim though and find what you want, especially on MacOS) or a palette (can be placed wherever it's the most useful, i.e. allowing the shortest mouse travel).

Please note that I still do consider Windows Office the best version nevertheless, but for different reasons.

The Ribbon is a much better UI because it takes up less room, makes more features more accessible, and provides much better discoverability. To appreciate the pros and cons, I'd suggest going though the full account of the development [1], though there is a simpler intro/index [2] that links to a good video [3].

Of course, there's also personal taste, and you are perfectly entitled to prefer whichever menu system you like. However, the Ribbon won a decade ago, so at this stage, it would probably be more useful to learn how to make better use of it. My Alt tip is just one example.

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/12/the-stor...

[3] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

macOS does have keyboard menu control and it is pretty good. http://lifehacker.com/321595/access-the-dock-and-menu-bar-fr...

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