I'm trying to design a user interface and keybinds for a TUI that is intuitive for both power users and casual users, and am instead slowly losing my mind.
Bikeshedders welcome.
I need keybinds for:
- Cycling tabs (currently tab)
- Selecting a certain tab (alt + 0-9)
- Scrolling up and down in a widget (up/down/j/k)
- Moving the selected item up/down (J/K, shift up/down?)
- Selecting multiple items (v or shift + v?)
- Changing focus to the widget beside or above/below (I used HJKL or shift + arrow for this until moving JK to moving items. Navigating to the side changes focus to the widget above/below if no element is on that side. This feels like UX murder.)
Things I could do:
- Assign a hotkey to each widget (the mnemonics overlap with hjkl)
- Use vi-like modes for navigating inside and outside of widgets. At this point god kills a kitten
- Do things like ctrl+u/d or ctrl+n/p but that is quite unwieldy
- Tell everyone to use a mouse which is antithetical to why I made a TUI in the first place and also I am Steve Jobs and you like this actually.
