I regularly use a pretty GUI-intense program, called REAPER, for editing digital audio. Its a very powerful application, full of amazing features and powerful yet simple tools.
Its a bit daunting at first, and can be overwhelming if you don't really have the patience to dig into it and find where everything is, in terms of grouped functionality.
However, one key thing made learning to use REAPER smooth as butter - the '?' key. This shows the "Action List", which is a list of all the things you can do in REAPER, in a text list .. so I can quickly type '?' - then 'section' and find all the actions related to sections. VERY useful, and quite a great way to explore the periphery of features I would otherwise not have discovered.
In fact, its the very first thing I teach anyone I'm introducing to REAPER, that they should use. I'd say, without this "text-based UI", the rest of the program wouldn't be nearly as accessible. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the REAPER developer seems to have a Power > Eye-candy attitude about the UI design - its clean, minimal, and functional when you first get started - but the UI is also fully tweak-able such that once you start getting productive with it, you find ways to make the GUI really shine (track colours, Layout customisations, etc.)
Anyway, I think its pretty interesting that the entire UI is accessible from the text-based '?' Action list query... I wish more programs would adopt this abstraction.
Its a bit daunting at first, and can be overwhelming if you don't really have the patience to dig into it and find where everything is, in terms of grouped functionality.
However, one key thing made learning to use REAPER smooth as butter - the '?' key. This shows the "Action List", which is a list of all the things you can do in REAPER, in a text list .. so I can quickly type '?' - then 'section' and find all the actions related to sections. VERY useful, and quite a great way to explore the periphery of features I would otherwise not have discovered.
In fact, its the very first thing I teach anyone I'm introducing to REAPER, that they should use. I'd say, without this "text-based UI", the rest of the program wouldn't be nearly as accessible. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the REAPER developer seems to have a Power > Eye-candy attitude about the UI design - its clean, minimal, and functional when you first get started - but the UI is also fully tweak-able such that once you start getting productive with it, you find ways to make the GUI really shine (track colours, Layout customisations, etc.)
Anyway, I think its pretty interesting that the entire UI is accessible from the text-based '?' Action list query... I wish more programs would adopt this abstraction.