Recently I've been going through a sort of 'Tk Phase' where I've been creating GUI interfaces for dozens of little scripts that I've made. I suppose this happens to people when they really 'discover' the Tk module.

One thing that occurred to me while doing this, is that both (Perl)Tk and Java sort of suffer from an 'overly visual' orientation in the ideaological(SP?) layout of the design API's.

What I mean by this is that it seems to be a lot of work binding Hot Key's to menus, buttons, etc.. I would think that in Tk, for example, it would be a simple option to create a keystroke equivalent of a button event.

Initially reading Learning Perl/Tk by Nancy Walsh was confusing because I thought that the -underline option's description implied that the key was bound to the widget, where in fact, you apparently have to add a binding to the Keyboard event(s). (Something I groked about 150 pages later)

My thoughts on this subject boiled down to this:

It is solely up to the programmer to create a 'Decent GUI design' wherein a user does not necessarily need to use a mouse to navigate/operate it.

I was once told & learned to agree with later, that 'You will always go faster using the keyboard than you will with a mouse.' (Albiet for experienced users...)



Wait! This isn't a Parachute, this is a Backpack!

Edit: chipmunk 2001-04-16

In reply to Decent GUI design by gregor42

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