GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
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This post has made it to the Hacker News front page. See the discussion .
Last week I came across a post on Hacker News that encouraged application developers to stop making terminal user interfaces 1 (a.k.a. TUIs) and instead focus on graphical user interfaces (a.k.a. GUIs). The post reached the HN front page and sparked a lively debate in the comments section.
I think there is merit in both sides of the debate. On one hand, I understand the GUI-positive arguments of the post author. In theory, the capabilities of GUI application frameworks are a superset of the capabilities of their TUI counterparts, so they should be preferred. On the other hand, as a heavy terminal user , I also greatly appreciate all TUIs that allow me to “stay” in the terminal and fulfill all my needs.
But I want to oppose a recurring argument in favor of TUIs that in my opinion does not have a solid foundation 2 . To paraphrase various commenters:
TUIs should be preferred because they are keyboard-driven.
While it’s true that if you randomly pick a GUI and a TUI application, the latter is more probable to be fully keyboard-driven, this does not tip the scale in favor of developing TUIs over GUIs 3 . What it does is highlight the inadequacies of keyboard navigation in many GUI applications.