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With Windows in particular, you absolutely can navigate Windows + Office keyboard only. I do it every day.

Now, third party software, is always going to be all over the place. Stuff that was largely built on Win32 components works fine, but "modern" stylized applications rarely have strong support.

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You’re right that lots of Windows apps were designed with Keyboard only workflows in mind. It’s a shame that MacOS has so many points where if you don’t have a mouse you’re out of luck.

There is one major improvement you can do on Mac, at least for menus:

https://varun.ch/posts/macos-keyboard/

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Obviously depends on your workflow but I think I use mouse only on websites on macos (with aerospace)
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If you're interested in keyboard navigation of websites, consider a browser or extension with link hinting support! It worked really well in my experience a few years ago, although I've since became much more of a mouse guy and stopped using it.

Qutebrowser was my favorite browser for keyboard navigation but firefox, chrome, etc. have extensions for this as well.

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Like the linked article says, every time I set up a new Mac, I’m annoyed that this isn’t the default.
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I get that this might annoy you, but there is a direct trace all the way back to the original Mac in 1984 that required a mouse. As time went on and the two other OSes we still have gained mouse support (Windows, Linux) from their keyboard roots, they brought forward their ethos of keyboard navigation. Mac OS resolutely stayed attached to its mouse only roots.
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“When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”

Well Tim, I suppose the blind do outnumber the handless.

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It was a significant downside of MacOS from the beginning, and it still is.
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I’m annoyed that this isn’t the default.

I really feel like this used to be the default. That's how I always did it in macOS going back to the early 2000's.

Only in the last two versions or so did I notice it was no longer the default. I'm glad to see here that I can now re-enable it.

Edit: I see that I do have it enabled. But for some reason there are a lot of programs where it doesn't seem to work anymore, no matter what the settings. Off the top of my head: Half the Adobe programs I use for work.

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Most things in Linux too - all DEs I have tried have lots of keyboard shortcuts and so do a lot of applications.

The problem is that they are less discoverable and you need to make and effort to get used to using them instead of point and click.

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They used to be discoverable with mnemonics (underlined letters) but those have been dead nearly thirty years…
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these still exist on windows though? you just hold alt
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Only works for like 20% of the menus though. I remember alt shortcuts reliably being on every single menu in early Windows (95? ME? XP?)
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They died when people stopped using native toolkits and started making everything an electron app.

Economics be damned, if you're going to make a native app, use the OS provided toolkits.

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Hah, I was thinking 3.1…
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GTK (and QT I do believe) also support this on GNU/Linux.
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I wouldn't say they're dead, just more hidden (e.g. GTK4 only shows them when you hold Alt). AFAIK most toolkits still support them, but app developers also have to actually define them.
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I just wish the shortcuts between the OS and Office were consistent. Most are, but some of the more commonly used ones aren't.
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> designing interfaces that keep pointing-device-free users in mind.

Agreed. Using keyboard keys to emulate a mouse cursor seems like it ought to be a last resort for graphical applications that lack proper accessibility affordances.

Contrast that with command palettes, accessibility controls, syntax tree navigation, and other approaches that rely on the names, content, and document structure that users already know rather than a special mode that displays two letter codes that must be read each time or memorized. Many of these other approaches also allow users to activate buttons, menu items, and links that are outside the current viewport or hidden in menus which reduces the overall number of "clicks" required to perform those actions. The downside is that they can take longer to type than a two-letter code. Still, my guess is that for most people it would be overall more efficient to optimize for cognitive load than pure speed.

(Though in the long run, I suspect that improvements in eye-tracking will lead to hybrid systems that are both lower cognitive load and faster than any of these.)

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A tiled window manager with Qutebrowser and it's vimium style shortcuts is the closest I have come to this.
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I just hit tab 1 to N times and hope for the best. I wonder if VIM style search on elements with a new HTML tag attribute would work (at least for browsers).
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I'm curious if there's a program that uses a simple detection model for UX components to locate clickable areas. This would allow for global navigation similar to VimiumC
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https://www.homerow.com/

Been using this for years.

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Wow, how I have I never heard of this, this seems like a way better model than mouseless
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Sorry, I forgot to add "on Linux" at the end. Still, that's a nice one!
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I think it's ok that hardware and software are designed with the 99% in mind. After that you probably run into competing interests/trade-offs anyway (a system built for ergonomics probably looks different from a system built for speed).
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I think it's ok that hardware and software are designed with the 99% in mind.

That's called mob rule. We don't act like cavemen anymore. We build entire civilizations to prevent that sort of thing. You may have read in a history book once "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

The word "all" is important.

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I think the controller interfaces for FFXIV is worth a study in this. They designed an interface that is workable for an MMORPG with both mouse and controller (in this case, the controller can act as a proxy for our keyboard).
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> interfaces that keep pointing-device-free users

There's plenty of TUIs for the dozens of you to use.

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