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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying it never happens; Blender is one example I've personally experienced where input velocity would be a major drain on productivity were it not for keyboard shortcuts. But suggesting that Twitter shouldn't involve a mouse just because it's "one-dimensional" content is laughable.

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I’m not a heavy twitter user so perhaps my experience is limited, but the actions I perform with the mouse are:

Scrolling, click to view replies, click to reply, click to retweet, click to like, click to view hashtag feed, click to view persons profile.

All of these things could be done efficiently with the keyboard (theres also no real reason to not still support mouse for the people who prefer it). I use the online checklist tool Checkvist.com and checklists are surprisingly similar to a linear feed like twitter. I use it almost exclusively with the keyboard, including editing, reordering, creating new items, tagging, colouring... Its super efficient and comfortable. There is no reason why you couldn’t have similar navigation and interactions on twitter. Personally, I find your outright dismissiveness of a keyboard-centric UI for twitter to be laughable shrug

Can you explain why it is laughable?

For one, there's a lot more on the page than the linear feed. And then each tweet has several actions you can take on it, a drop down menu, etc. What was a single click becomes two or more keystrokes. When you factor in the other views that are even less linear - settings, editing your profile, messaging - you run into a long tail of cases that are poorly suited to a keyboard alone. This tends to be the case: a hyper-focused UI may work a little better with a keyboard than with a mouse, but a mouse does a much better job supporting the wide range of different cases out there and giving users a way to explore and discover the UI.

There are a lot of people who never use a mouse while browsing the web! That's possible with browser extensions like Vimium, which show you a keyboard shortcut on every link when you press a key. "Two or more keystrokes" is a lot faster than using the mouse with that scheme.

The things you mention as less efficient with a keyboard actually sound like plus points for a keyboard to me, personally. Especially messaging.

Besides, you can create a keyboard centric UI without removing mouse support if you really want. It’s just that keyboard should be treated as a first class interaction method, instead of an almost tacked on accessibility feature.

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