Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Unless you use a keyboard shortcut in your GUI, in which case all bets are off. I remember being constantly frustrated back in the Adobe Illustrator 10 / Photoshop 7 days that the standard shortcuts (like cmd-H and cmd-M) did something completely different than I expected.

I think this is one of the big problems with both CLIs and (most) GUIs. We're stuck in a particular mode of thinking. For CLIs, it's that pressing a letter key must append that letter (and only that letter) on the screen, like a typewriter. Traditional GUIs have their own problems, which I'm sure half the crowd here can recite in their sleep.

When developing my app Strukt, I discovered I really needed to decouple "how you type it on the keyboard" from "what it looks like on screen". You get autocomplete on all operations and flags, so you can type just the first letter of a flag, but still see the whole thing on screen. It appears that some other modern editors (like Atom) have adopted a similar system, which is great. Emacs, of course, has had this forever (but has its own UI issues). :-)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: