Hacker News Reader

Comment by godot | Hacker News Reader

I got to that point and had the same reaction you did, but finished reading the thread and realized he's actually claiming something far more ambitious and interesting than I thought he was.

Particularly when he clarified that keyboard-only doesn't just mean text-based, and it can be graphical and keyboard-only. I'm trying to imagine UI that are graphical and beautiful but works with keyboard only, and it actually could be a very interesting world if that were popular. It's not unlike games from older days where ways of input is limited and input is purpose-driven.

For sure, as you said, there's the discovery/exploratory aspect of using a software where GUI helps a lot. But there's definitely merit in what the author is saying.

View on HN

Blender is a fairly good example of visual software usable with a keyboard only. Especially in older versions there were a lot of functions you couldn't even get to with a mouse. These days everything has a way to get to it from both the mouse and keyboard.

Turns out that an interface like that is really hard to learn but also really fast once you do. Extruding a face along the normal is as easy as getting it selected somehow (which I do with the mouse, but there's plenty of keyboard based selection tools too) and hitting e, followed by z twice, and then either entering a distance on the keyboard or moving the mouse to move it a bit. Personally I love the interplay between keyboard and mouse: you can pick whichever method is most effective. For selecting specific things or moving stuff until it looks right you use the mouse, for selecting in bulk or moving stuff specific distances you use the keyboard. Or a combination. Whichever is convenient.

So I think if you can solve the discoverability problem of keyboard shortcuts it'd be a real productivity boost for power users.

Blender is a great piece of software and I love it but speaking of the keyboard shortcuts in Blender, one thing that annoys me about it is the reliance on the numpad for some of the keyboard shortcuts I would like to use. The reason those shortcuts annoy me is that I don’t have a numpad, so I am unable to use them.

But you could easily acquire one. I'd imagine most physical keyboards do have numpads?

I wouldn't say most. I rarely come across laptops that support a numpad for example.

External number pads are cheap. If someone's spending enough time using programs for which a number pad would be very helpful, it's probably worth the few dollars they cost and the tiny amount of space they take up (similar to a normal-size corded mouse—slightly larger footprint, but thinner)

Not OP, but I don't have a numpad amongst my keyboards. As my computing experience changed, I had to get used to touchtyping numbers above the letters; previously, I had almost always used the numpad.

My laptop has no number pad. I use it when I want a portable keyboard device, so an external keyboard would be irrelevant and unnecessary. Buying a device with a numpad built in would be a compromise that makes the built in keyboard even less useful, due to its non-centred location - in the unlikely event that everything else was identical.

My external keyboards have no numpad. They're ergonomic keyboards. One built for size, the other built uncompromisingly ergonomically. Ergonomic design actually speaks against number pads, since it means you have to extend you arm further to reach the mouse, and an uncompromised ergonomic design are wider than a regular keyboard since you want more separation between the two hands - so the number pad becomes an even bigger issue.

I've sometimes thought about buying an external numpad. But so far I neevr have.

> Ergonomic design actually speaks against number pads, since it means you have to extend you arm further to reach the mouse

I don’t have this problem with my Kinesis Advantage, since the numpad is embedded in the main keyboard (using a mode shift/switch to access, which I have mapped to a foot pedal)

> Ergonomic design actually speaks against number pads

Either move the mouse or the number pad to your left hand. I've left moused in the office for years (Yahoo! ergo team preached it when I joined), and it took a bit of getting used to, and limits your mouse choices, but it's actually pretty nice sometimes to be able to have one hand on the mouse and the other on the number pad. Mousing with one hand in the office and the other hand at home can help with overuse injuries too (although, using good techniques is much better for that). Of course, that still doesn't get you a numberpad on a reasonably sized laptops, but laptop keyboards are an ergo nightmare anyway, reaching over today's enormous touchpads is awful.

Real keyboards do, but there are far fewer of us with proper full-size IBM-style keyboards than laptops that are cut down to 13-15 inches and have more-or-less eccentric layouts.

Emulate numpad+emulate 3 button mouse (IIRC)

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/124/how-to-emula...

True, but you can turn on "numpad emulation" and then use the normal number keys as substitute. It's a weak substitute though, The whole point of the numpad is that it makes those shortcuts work somewhat as directional keys, which is lost when using the normal number keys.

Additionally I don't think it allows you to substitute a period for the numpad period key which is a rather important button in day-to-day blender usage. Of course you can re-map any key you like, but it'd be nice to have it set up right by default.

EDIT: and of course under a recent blender version (2.5+) there's the search box if you really don't want to use your mouse ;)

No longer an issue with the latest major release. All views and manipulations can be performed just like your favorite other 3D softwares.

Also, I bought a separate mechanical 10key years ago and never looked back. It's a fantastic addition to any 40-60%.

My laptop has no built-in numpad. Yet I use all the Blender numpad related keymappings and do all my graphics using a mouse / pen. I've done this at airport lounges without issues. USB numpads aren't that rare. Neither are mice.

Blender is a perfect example of the ideal compromise between "takes 10 clicks to do anything" and "takes 10 days to learn to do anything".

You can start in blender ploddingly wandering though the gui as you discover features and then streamline your workflow with the keyboard shortcuts as you go. As you do so, it feels a lot like leveling up in a particularly good game.

Very few pieces of software currently do this well these days. Its a breath of fresh air. Especially v2.8.

I'm not understanding the adversion to the keyboard in the comments here. It's just faster. I prefer not having to reach over and find the mouse or trackpad, then wiggle around to find the cursor. Useful only when the keyboard ux is bad.

Imagine playing piano while having to take a hand off the keys and find a mouse during the song. It would be impossible to keep up. Keyboard only is speedy when learned.

I'm not taking sides on this one, but thought you might find this article interesting that was posted here 2 days ago. https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

The key take-away was they spent a lot of money on a research project specifically about mouse vs. keyboard and found the precise opposite to be true! Surprising to say the least.

* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Considering all the time I have wasted in recent years wrestling with text selection and cursor positioning on touchscreen devices, this discussion seems delightfully pointless: they are both so much faster than the third option that any difference between the two must be insignificant.

I have no idea why you're getting downvoted.

Supplying actual data is always useful.

Especially when it contradicts a common opinion ;)

Supplying actual data is always useful. If only that article did that :).

Sometimes, articles that contradict a common opinion do so because they're simply dead wrong. This is one of those cases.

I'll admit it's not much data, and there doesn't appear to be a source. But it vaguely refers to a study, and doesn't just reflect the authors preferences.

Did Apple do a study? Did it come to the conclusion that the mouse was faster? If so, why is it dead wrong?

I don't know if Apple did a study, and I'm not particularly inclined to look hard for it, because the argumentation from the article series itself is pretty much bogus and uses some weird test setups (like https://www.asktog.com/SunWorldColumns/S02KeyboardVMouse3.ht... and the e -> | replacement game); that, coupled with my real-world experience which every day proves superiority of keyboard over mouse in structured interfaces, leads me to assign very low prior to the validity of the conclusion of that Apple study, as reported by Tog.

(The study perhaps had a more narrow set of conclusions than presented in the article. Wouldn't surprise me.)

> The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding

Without specifying how it was tested that's meaningless. For example I've read of a test where keyboard users were slower because they had to do a find/replace operation on a file manually, moving the cursor only with arrow keys. That's like saying using the mouse is slower after forcing mouse users to type text on a virtual keyboard.

I think in most scenarios both can be fast enough that the difference doesn't matter, provided there's proper support for both.

I think the point is, that a keyboard is better when you know what you are doing, and a mouse is more suitable for “discovery” i.e. when you dont know what you are doing.

This jives quite well for me. When I’m working keyboard is almost always better, but when I’m messing around with software I’m unfamiliar with and I haven't yet familiarised myself with the keys for it, I’ll poke around with a mouse. Once I figure out my workflow then I’ll probably use the keys more.

Yes and no. I discovered just fine with a keyboard, arguably better than with a mouse. Tap the Alt key, use the arrows to explore the menus.

Unlike with a mouse, the keyboard never "fell off" the active menu tree requiring me to start over.

Unlike with a mouse, the keyboard couldn't hide things until I moused-over them. Recently I spent quite a while trying to find the zoom controls on a PDF because they were transparent until I randomly waved the mouse in a corner of the screen where there were no controls.

Mouse-driven discovery sucks, IMHO/IME.

> Tap the Alt key, use the arrows to explore the menus.

You have to know that this is possible as a user, and app developers have to support it, and/or not override the default operating system handling.

This is, without a doubt, an area that we have regressed on. I remember very clearly that when I was first learning to program VB6, UI conventions were pretty standardized on Windows, and so you just did a lot of this stuff by default - you had a &File menu, and &New, &Load, &Save, and E&xit commands on it.

Some software still does this, but it is increasingly rare; in Chrome right now, the Alt key doesn't do anything, and I find that Electron apps have to go out of their way to mimic native conventions, as VS Code does.

So there's less software that follows keyboard-driven conventions, so fewer users know about those conventions, creating a vicious circle. Not to mention that the bulk of your average person's "computer" usage is poking at a touchscreen phone or tablet that has no physical keys at all, just godawful on-screen keyboards.

I think the average user did know it was possible, because the hotkeys for everything were shown in the menu, and "alt-f" to open the file menu was just how things were done. Or you could click on it with the mouse, and still see the hotkeys to get back to it faster next time.

The user-hostile pattern of nested levels of mouse-maze menu, which collapse if you stray one pixel out of the required path, absolutely infuriates me. I can't imagine who thought this was a good idea or what sort of pointing device they used.

What you're really describing is bad UI design. It's not a fault with the interaction method at all. Your whole argument that "keys are well documented" can fall down if a developer doesn't bother their hole to document their keys, or to follow a standard keyboard pattern.

I completely agree it's bad UI design, but it's also become the standard. Some modern "standard" did away with buttons that look like the buttons we spent 20 years learning the look of, scroll bars that look like the scroll bars we spent 20 years learning the look of, hotkeys with underlined letters that we spent 20 years looking for and learning to speed our interaction with frequently-used programs.

It's absolutely bad UI design, but I think it's become the rule rather than the exception. It's just "prettier", according to some jerk who never used a hotkey in his life.

I understand you now. I think this has more to do with the prevalence of "touch" than mouses particularly.

> It's just "prettier", according to some jerk

Some would say "brave" and with jerk I think you're being too kind :-)

I double-dog dare you to do any significant photo editing using only the keyboard.

These days, I'm doing all my editing with image-magick from the commandline.

This goes back to structured vs unstructured from elsewhere in the thread. Applying most of the editing tools is unstructured, but navigating the UI is structured.

As a result, I'm very fast at navigating menus and switching tools in my program of choice (GIMP), because those are rapid keypresses rather than forced mouse clicks. It's just so much faster to click Alt+I > S, type a few numbers, hit Tab a couple times, and enter (well, Space usually), than it is to navigate with the mouse to the Scale Image drop-down, put my hands back on the keys to type numbers in, and then switch back to the mouse to hit OK. Ctrl+Q is much easier and faster than clicking the Selection Editor button. Alt+L > T > 9 is the quickest and simplest way of rotating the current layer - a more mouse-based UI might even refuse to give me a 90-degree option and instead force me into manual control. And of course, keeping a hand on the keyboard so it can quickly type a key or shift-key is much faster and more accurate than having to mouse over to the Toolbox to select a tool.

You really need to learn how to use a tablet.

Or a 2-in-1 device with a touchscreen and a pen (e.g. Surface).

The non-graphical tablets with pens are really a different type of interaction, and one that supersedes keyboard + mouse for light graphics. Using one hand with the pen for pointer input + another hand for touch input is really powerful. Moving around, zooming, or rotating things on the screen is easier done with a hand. And a wheel menu (context or otherwise) really starts to shine with a pen.

I wish more software actually supported this. I currently own such a device (a Dell), and I'm searching for software that can utilize touch+pen input to full extent, but there aren't many programs that can.

Pretty late but a lot of significant photo editing is done with one hand on the keyboard for shortcuts and the other hand on the wacom pen, no mouse involved.

Isn't it more akin to playing piano (being like using a mouse), reaching for octaves, vs. playing, say, a saxophone where you press a "meta" key to change octave (and alter breathing, but that's just a limitation of the analogy) being more like using a keyboard?

The problems I have with keyboard are usually discoverability.

Nah, they're both like keyboards. Playing piano is like typing. Changing octave with a "meta" key is like using Meta (Alt) on your keyboard.

Nobody has an aversion to the keyboard, they just disagree with the "people that use mice are idiots" crowd.

Considering that the Qwerty keyboard was deliberately designed to be slow, then yes, I do have an aversion to the keyboard.

I'm a Pom (British/Australian) living in Germany, so most keyboards in shared locations are unusable for me. Using other people's computers is a massive pain as my carefully-learned muscle memory is now actively stopping me from pushing the right keys.

I keep looking at Dvorak or a chord input device, but I know that if I get used to that then I'll have to carry one around with me always so that I can plug it in to whatever computer I'm using at that point. This doesn't seem practical.

I'd love another input option. One that was actually designed for humans to communicate fast with.

I use Dvorak on a Kinesis and typing on a regular keyboard isn’t a big deal. It’s surprising, but learning Dvorak or another keyboard doesn’t really make you worse at the original.

It did for me when I tried it.

you're lucky. I couldn't even use Vim because anytime I entered text in any other setting, my muscle memory slapped ESC as soon as I was done entering. On most computerised forms, that's a bad thing. I still find myself hitting ESC when I've finished a code edit, and I'm not even using Vim any more.

I don't want to know what my muscle memory would do if it got used to a Dvorak keyboard.

> Considering that the Qwerty keyboard was deliberately designed to be slow

Hasn't that origin story been debunked?

e.g. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...

> Considering that the Qwerty keyboard was deliberately designed to be slow

No, this is a myth that doesn't become more true just because many people perpetuate it without question.

QWERTY was designed to be as fast as possible for the first data entry jobs at the first companies that adopted typewriters and went through a couple iterations based on feedback of these first customers.

Is QWERTY optimal? No. But it's good enough that learning an alternative layout like Dvorak for months may cost you more of your lifetime than you'll ever get back by typing minimally faster(not to mention such a switch would be more costly with every single keyboard shortcut you've memorised so far).

Either way if you are waiting for a better alternative to become the standard so you don't need to carry your own keyboard you're going to need a lot of patience.

Qwerty was designed to cut down on jams caused by adjacent typewriter arms, which generally were adjacent keys.

While not designed for best human use, it's not completely terrible.

Azerty vs Qwerty verus Qwertz is a different issue entirely.

> I'm trying to imagine UI that are graphical and beautiful but works with keyboard only, and it actually could be a very interesting world if that were popular.

Windows is mostly mouse optional. You very rarely need a mouse, it's just way more common to use one. My memory is a bit off, but I know Win 95 was fine, I think it got a bit worse in XP (a lot more things that were hard to tab to), and 10 is ok, but not great.

I do not use Windows much, but when the search box was added to the start menu (in Windows Vista I think), it was a huge navigational improvement for me.

I've done a ton of keyboard only on XP and 7 - it's mostly fine.

I would like to murder the group of fools that managed to make a GUI for a touchscreen service program that was unusable without mouse and disabled the touch unit for some functionality, but that's neither here nor there.

Full keyboard navigation capability used to be the standard for Desktop applications. It still is, if the application is well-programmed and uses native controls, but unfortunately you can no longer count on it with all those browser-based monstrosities on the desktop nowadays.

CAD/CAM software would be difficult, possibly unusable to use keyboard only. I had a good left hand hotkey setup for everything I could, but there were things I had to use the mouse for that would have been slow, painful and tedious to do on a keyboard and I can't really think of anything better than a mouse for those.

A drawing tablet is better than a literal mouse. They are pretty cheap, have better ergonomics, and you can use them proficiently pretty much instantly.

Not for CAD/CAM. I’ve tried it, but, for my money and time a mouse is way more effective for managing multiple, detailed selections.

Are you using a 3D mouse?

For you, yes. I (and a lot of other people) have a disorder that makes my hands shakes when the muscles are tense [0]. This means that the only way I can interact precisely is with my arm laying down on the desk and only the fingers moving the mouse. This is just one example of a wide variety of problems/annoyances. To everyone out there design user interfaces: please remember that people are not either perfectly fine or with disabilities in a black&white fashion, there is a lot of grey in between.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_tremor

My father has ET. I have often watched him use the mouse two-handed. One arm driving tensely (with tremor) and the second hand holding the wrist of the first (with less as not engaged in fine work).

I have early signs. I often wonder if I will eventually be pushed into the grey disability area parent mentioned moreso from UI "progression" than from ET progression

I lived with (not that bad) ET since I've memories more or less, and I'm still under 30. Nonetheless, I encounter daily "difficulties" in doing basic things like typing my code on the door keypad (I miss the correct button and I need to re-enter the code), signing on the POS while the delivery guy keeps it floating mid-air in front of me, etc. Those are obviously nothing compared to real disabilities, but some of them could be easily avoided with a bit of smart design of UI.

For you perhaps; I find these very hard to use. Something hand-eye coordination that really does not work for me while a mouse is no issue at all. And I tried because the idea feels nice.

Anything graphical is naturally difficult to use with the keyboard only, but since you bring up CAD/CAM --- that's an example of software which is equally difficult or even impossible to use with the mouse only, especially when you want precise control over things.

True, I had my setup done fps style. Most of my commands were within finger reach of wasd. When i first learned the software, there were no commands set to hotkeys. It was a lot slower using menus or toolbar buttons.

My dad had a digitiser tablet for doing CAD, this big slab in front of the keyboard with a mouse like thing but instead of a ball or optics it had a crosshair made out of copper on it to precisely pin point where you were on the surface. There was an area that represented the screen and around it were all manner of UI shortcuts.

I remember it was much more accurate to use than a mouse, and better interface than having toolbars all over the display.

so did my dad for a very long time. But in recent years he (and my brother as well) switched to a normal mouse. I haven't asked him why (I should!), but I suspect that lack of support from more recent OS revisions and the hardware just being harder to find might be a reason.

I have used the digitiser a few times and it seemed much more efficient than the mouse.

Also autocad has (or at least had, last time I looked at it years ago) a very prominent prompt where to input keyboard commands (in autolisp, no less!).

maybe current breed of optical/laser mice are just really good enough.

Very possible. Also, with everything being already digitised today, there is less of a need of being able to precisely input points from a piece of paper.

That's a graphics tablet/digitizer and a puck.

http://www.brisk.org.uk/gt1212b/index.html

Crazy high res and absolute rather than relative which makes them very useful for some applications.

Yep, that one and another less colourful model.

I use a browser extension called Vimium which is an astoundingly faster way to navigate web apps via keyboard. I somewhat reluctantly picked it up in large part to deal with some RSI issues but now I couldn't go back.

For example, take a look at qutebrowser (or Vimium if you're more into getting an extension for your current browser). It support basically 100% keyboard based browsing.

Or Tridactyl.

All the ms office 365 products are this already minus the beautiful. I only use keyboard shortcuts to interact with them.

Same, and it's really intelligent design because you hit the alt key and it shows you the next key next to the usual buttons so you can keep keyboard navigating instead of forcing you to remember every single one. You end up memorizing them pretty quickly anyway for the most common use cases but can still keyboard navigate very rapidly to novel locations. I'm actually a big fan, despite my reflexive aversion to Microsoft products leftover from the 90's and 2000's.

There's a big challenge in usability with keyboard-only. I don't at all dispute that keyboard is faster, once you learn how to use it with whatever application(s), but that's exactly the problem.

I heavily use the keyboard, and for certain things (mostly apps I use daily) I'm highly proficient with it, barely touching the mouse at all. But once in a while I have to work with a spreadsheet, or edit an icon, or use some other piece of software I only use maybe a couple times per year. I simply don't remember shortcuts and I certainly can't justify spending the time to (re)learn enough to be more efficient keyboard-only that with a mouse, so I just rely on the mouse.

It's hard to imagine any keyboard-only (G)UI doing a better job at making usage discoverable than what can be done with a mouse-enabled one.

The problem is and always was the lack of a good online help system. Apple and Microsoft did really lousy jobs with those systems. The OS should provide a whole screen display that instantly gives you a cheat sheet of the most important keyboard shortcuts, and it needs to be clearly readable and intelligently organized. Its mysterious to me why this is not standard in every operating system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com