Re: Interface Design

Yet another vi fanatic/reinventer...
Another quick dismissal without even bothering to read the text.

I did read the text.

Modern interfaces allow to do the same action using different
approaches. The keyboard is not always the best solution, because it
drasticly incrases learning curve. For that reason f.e. context menus
came.
In text editor you can save a document by pressing ctrl+s or choose
proper menu option. There are much more options that are commonly used
to, but not frequent, like printing. Forcing user to remeber keyboard
shortcut for them would be nothing but sadistic...

Nowhere did he force the user to memorize a keyboard shortcut. He
merely set it up in a way that the user will naturally memorize the
keyboard shortcut.

His second proposal of menu replacement is not better than path fulfilling of filesystem in a terminal console (chars+tab).
In fact it requires more writing than choosing the most used option by keyboard shortcut (ctrl+s to save), because of disambiguation. You have to press keys until you get through the full "menu path" to get a needed option. What kind of shortcut is that? ;)
Maybe you could fix this problem by adding some "intelligence" like:
s = Save
s- = Save-As

but what to do with "Save All"?
sa = Save All
but
sa is also beginning of Save...

Maybe addition of special char is the answer
:sa = Save All?

any Vi similarities? ;)

From this point it's only a step for Vi-like shortcutism which probably
he will introduce in the next article ;)

His current point of view was invented long time ago and is commonly used there, where it suits, that is browsing hierarchical text structures that _change_. It's optimal only for that.

Personally I memorize shortcuts (real shortcuts) using the menu a few dozen times. In normal menu you have a shortcut written on the right. When it's really useful (frequent usage) I learn it without any efforts.
Doing GUI for one application once I made a special version that counted menu selection during a week of usage by beta testers. That gave me the answer which keyboard shortcuts were the best. And there were only 7 menu positions worth to shortcut.

regards,
Jakub


.

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