Hacker News Reader

Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

I keep staring at this image, hoping we could go back: https://stonetools.ghost.io/content/images/2026/02/123_001.p...

Information density, no decorative UI elements distracting you from the content, and keyboard navigability.

Also, despite the CPU being 1000x slower, redraws were extremely fast. If they weren't quite fast enough, then the combo of deterministic keyboard nav and a reliable type ahead buffer meant the user could queue up a burst of actions from muscle memory.

I still remember the original key combo to insert a row above the current selection, from nearly 30 years ago (Excel 95 I think): Alt A, I, A.

I love the menus. Autodesk Animator from 1989 also has menus where the first letter is always unique. Also buttons and some other UI elements. I did not remember that UI convention from back in the day, but when I experienced it recently it made me sad modern GUI applications are never that well designed. Maybe it used to be common?

Software designed before the mouse could be assumed (which was surprisingly late on the PC side; Windows before 95 didn't assume it at all) always had well-thought out keyboard shortcuts (some going so far as to have a printed piece of plastic you'd lay over the function keys or the entire keyboard).

Animator pretty much required a mouse or tablet though and it was released late enough (1989) for PC mice to be common and certainly something someone would buy to use software like that. There is support for moving the mouse pointer using the arrow keys, but I can't imagine many were drawing much like that.

Keyboard overlays were probably even more common in the 1980's. The F-keys make a lot more sense when there is an overlay for the application you use. Memorizing what each Fn is for is no fun unless each key somehow map to something related to the number n.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com