One Week: No Mouse, Just Keyboard

jfruhlinger writes "Anyone in tech has heard from grousing old-timers who believe the GUI was the beginning of the end of civilization and that EMacs keyboard shortcuts are all the interface anyone should need. But can someone use a modern consumer OS without laying hands on a mouse? Kevin Purdy gave it a week-long try."

Keyboard only support should be mandatory

[Killer Orca]

I had an adviser who was blind, the only was he could access his computer was a combination screen reader + keyboard. I cannot imagine the number of things he is cut-off from due to a lack of support for keyboards.

Re:And more importantly...

[vux984]

Here you have keyboard commands that millions of people have memorized

certainly not millions.
thousands for sure.
maybe 10s of thousands.

why the hell did they change it?

Because opening the start menu puts you in the search bar. Pressing "U" in the search bar puts a U in the search bar. It can't really be used for a hotkey unless nobody is allowed to search for things that start with 'u'.

And for what its worth, putting search in the start bar was a GOOD thing. I rarely ever have to go digging through the start menu hierarchy any more.

Search is better than the run dialog as well because it works for documents, as well.

So why they hell did they change it? Because they made it better, and millions of users (this time actual millions) benefitted.

It's almost as if Microsoft doesn't give a damn about their customers

Or maybe its you that doesn't? Because having everyone else have to push an extra key to get the search box just so people like you could still press U instead of right-arrow would be asinine.

Re:Windows?

[Samantha Wright]

A WM isn't the whole story. You could end up still fighting the GUI toolkit all the way down if the application isn't built with foresight. Even something as simple as bad tab order between fields.