It’s good for repetetive tasks & muscle memory compared to clicking. Lots of industry, banking or form entry (like in airports) is done with keyboard only GUI.
I think users are increasingly mouse-centric so the ability to is the mouse I think is a plus, as long as it’s all still just as accessible to a keyboard-centric workflow.
But I think making the shell more interactive and adding more affordances is broadly a good thing and is really the important part, regardless of whether the user can navigate more with the mouse. The shell doesn’t need to be a magic black box you speak the arcane language into and hope you got it right
Anything that helps better communicate to the user what you can do and how to do it would make the terminal way more accessible, which would be a boon for linux where you still sometimes come across things that don’t have a good graphical path to completion, or even just one that’s easy enough to find and follow.
Fish makes a lot of improvements (and it’s a lot more Unix compliant than it used to be, to my understanding, but that’s still its biggest downside) but I think more affordances and interactivity for the shell is awesome, even for users who appreciate the efficiency of a keyboard-centric workflow :)
No the point of terminals is not to make people that dislike mice happy. They simply were created before mice were common and haven’t been updated at all. This is an attempt to do that.
Haven’t been updated at all??? That’s very much not true. There’s so much going on in terminal world. There are many flavours of modern terminal emulators, multiplexers, shells. There’s a ton of sophisticated terminal oriented software like Neovim for example. Pretty much every single part of terminal environment has now feature-rich, performant and safer alternative implementations. The terminal and CLI world is thriving. Almost none of that massive cumulative effort is directed towards the mouse support. I really think it’s just not what people want.
Yeah there’s more stuff that runs in the shell. But pretty much all the things you mentioned would work on a VT100 from the 70s. This is about modernising the terminal itself.
Hell, Linux terminal emulators don’t even have a “clear screen & scroll-back” keyboard shortcut like Command-K on Mac. There’s no command output history, there are no auto-complete popups, editing commands is still extremely basic (no multiline input for example). The command prompt doesn’t even have the text editing capabilities of Notepad.
This is really weird. I love working in the terminal precisely because I can do everything without using the mouse. I thought that’s the point?
No hate though, I just don’t get it.
Fully keyboard accessible GUI goes TAB TAB TAB ENTER.
That’s better than nothing, obviously, but I wouldn’t call pressing tab repeatedly the epitome of good keyboard-driven UX.
It’s good for repetetive tasks & muscle memory compared to clicking. Lots of industry, banking or form entry (like in airports) is done with keyboard only GUI.
I was referring specifically to “tab only GUI”. I’m sure a proper keyboard only GUI can be great.
I think users are increasingly mouse-centric so the ability to is the mouse I think is a plus, as long as it’s all still just as accessible to a keyboard-centric workflow.
But I think making the shell more interactive and adding more affordances is broadly a good thing and is really the important part, regardless of whether the user can navigate more with the mouse. The shell doesn’t need to be a magic black box you speak the arcane language into and hope you got it right
Anything that helps better communicate to the user what you can do and how to do it would make the terminal way more accessible, which would be a boon for linux where you still sometimes come across things that don’t have a good graphical path to completion, or even just one that’s easy enough to find and follow.
Fish makes a lot of improvements (and it’s a lot more Unix compliant than it used to be, to my understanding, but that’s still its biggest downside) but I think more affordances and interactivity for the shell is awesome, even for users who appreciate the efficiency of a keyboard-centric workflow :)
No the point of terminals is not to make people that dislike mice happy. They simply were created before mice were common and haven’t been updated at all. This is an attempt to do that.
Haven’t been updated at all??? That’s very much not true. There’s so much going on in terminal world. There are many flavours of modern terminal emulators, multiplexers, shells. There’s a ton of sophisticated terminal oriented software like Neovim for example. Pretty much every single part of terminal environment has now feature-rich, performant and safer alternative implementations. The terminal and CLI world is thriving. Almost none of that massive cumulative effort is directed towards the mouse support. I really think it’s just not what people want.
Yeah there’s more stuff that runs in the shell. But pretty much all the things you mentioned would work on a VT100 from the 70s. This is about modernising the terminal itself.
Hell, Linux terminal emulators don’t even have a “clear screen & scroll-back” keyboard shortcut like Command-K on Mac. There’s no command output history, there are no auto-complete popups, editing commands is still extremely basic (no multiline input for example). The command prompt doesn’t even have the text editing capabilities of Notepad.