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Yes and no. The big advantage of a GUI is having interactive 2D coordinate input support (aka a pointer, or gestures.) While I think a keyboard can be a great
by binary132 1mo ago
Yes and no. The big advantage of a GUI is having interactive 2D coordinate input support (aka a pointer, or gestures.) While I think a keyboard can be a great control surface, that’s one thing it really lacks and only GUIs really offer. So to enforce that the whole GUI must be keyboard-drivable requires limiting the major advantage of the GUI. I’m a fan of the Emacs or Plan9 styles where the keyboard and pointer are able to be used together synergistically. You also see some of this in tools like video, DAW, and 2D/3D graphical scene editors.
- eviks 1mo agoWhat's specifically is the limitation?
- binary132 29d agoLet’s use the obvious example of a paint program. Clearly continuous 2D pointer input is an essential feature that would be almost impossible to replicate with only a keyboard. To step back a few levels, a node graph editor with many elements will simply always be easier to interact with using a mouse. But editing text and interacting with other applications such as visual debugger are really only a tiny bit removed from that.
- eviks 29d ago> with only a keyboard But that's a limitation you've made up, driven by keyboard doesn't mean "only"! It just means that all actions should be possible with a keyboard. So in your 2D paint ideally there should be a way to draw a line with a keyboard
- ckardaris 1mo agoI agree. I mention this briefly in one of the footnotes. There are some tasks that greatly benefit from the mouse (e.g photo editing tasks where arbitrary region point and click is required). This does not contradict the argument. The rest of the interface, everything that is known and stable in advance, should be full keyboard-driven.