Ask HN: What happend to making websites more like terminals?

by kevinsimperon 2/2/2022, 10:09 PMwith 1 comments

Terminals are great, text input -> text output.

Terminals are not so visual, and any advance input can be complicated to remember or even type (see input to ffmpeg).

However I feel websites that are used heavily like for customer support teams, that continuously does the same actions, but a wide range of them, could benefit of being able to control more of a website with keyboards.

I think the best example of a keyboard focus website is linear.app, but even that has two types of search (shift + / and CMD + K) And it shows keyboard shortcuts on mouse over.

However, clicking the right and left arrow does not move between the main area and the sidebar. Only clicking up and down arrow changes between the active row currently selected.

I know of Vimium for Chrome, which allows you to press F and then the letter for clicking a link.

However, what happend to those terminals that were focus heavily on the arrow keys to quickly navigate? Those old terminals? Like the current "raspi-config" we have.

Obviously it is pretty hard to navigate with a keyboard on mobile, but "mobile first" does dictate a design that is very narrow and would fit a keyboard navigation. It is funny to see how all cloud providers has a Cloud Shell.

Have we decided that navigating with mouse is the best interface?

by yuppie_scumon 2/3/2022, 12:29 AM

Navigating with scrolling fingertips is the best interface.