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Comment by bdhe | Hacker News Reader

What usually puzzles me in all these discussions is the concept of keyboard shortcuts. They're a middle ground between GUI and command line (stretching the definition of middle ground a little). But my personal experience with people like my parents and even sometimes colleagues who use computers more than 3-4 hrs a day as part of their job is that there is a big aversion to keyboard shortcuts. I can't imagine how Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V are in any sense harder than painfully clicking 2-3 times through hierarchical menus, but somehow my anecdotal experience leads me to believe that people just don't value time efficiency in a way power users do (or maybe that can be used to define power users).

Maybe understanding why keyboard shortcuts are used so little might help us understand why the command line has lesser adoption among the non-power users.

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> somehow my anecdotal experience leads me to believe that [some] people just don't value time efficiency

If you stop an average (and I mean genuinely average) person on the street, they probably won't even understand 'time efficiency' unless you lead them. If you stop an above average person, they will understand the idea, but admit that they don't care about it. What they care about is 'mental efficiency' (ie "I don't mind if takes 3 times as long. I don't want to have to think").

If you encounter a significantly above average person in the work place, and try to point out how they could do something twice as quickly, they will generally respond "Just let me get it done".

(Bear in mind that in terms of computer use, the average person only just owns a computer, and anyone reading this comment is easily in the top 2%).

Keyboard shortcuts don't usually offer much feedback that you're on the right track. If you make a typo while using them they can become very confusing.

Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V are actally good examples. With no feedback on Ctrl-C at all, you can often mis-type Ctrl-V instead and have no idea until you try to paste later. Weirdly, some programs don't support those shortcuts, which leads to similar problems.

I think that sort of faceless failure makes many users feel really, really dumb and out of control. I suspect they prefer menus because they can see when they're getting things right and when they're goofing up.

It's not insoluble, but no system I'm familiar with makes it a priority, either.

The problem with keyboard shortcuts is you're still wedded to the GUI. Instead of being able to type 'Play "Teenage Dream"' you have to navigate down a GUI tree, something like File-->Play-->Album-->Teenage Dream-->Teenage Dream. For me the time is in reading the GUI context at each level, so it's just as fast to use the mouse.

I think it comes down to memory and learning curve, especially for people who use a wide variety of systems with widely varying shortcuts.

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