Yes and no. I discovered just fine with a keyboard, arguably better than with a mouse. Tap the Alt key, use the arrows to explore the menus.

Unlike with a mouse, the keyboard never "fell off" the active menu tree requiring me to start over.

Unlike with a mouse, the keyboard couldn't hide things until I moused-over them. Recently I spent quite a while trying to find the zoom controls on a PDF because they were transparent until I randomly waved the mouse in a corner of the screen where there were no controls.

Mouse-driven discovery sucks, IMHO/IME.

> Tap the Alt key, use the arrows to explore the menus.

You have to know that this is possible as a user, and app developers have to support it, and/or not override the default operating system handling.

This is, without a doubt, an area that we have regressed on. I remember very clearly that when I was first learning to program VB6, UI conventions were pretty standardized on Windows, and so you just did a lot of this stuff by default - you had a &File menu, and &New, &Load, &Save, and E&xit commands on it.

Some software still does this, but it is increasingly rare; in Chrome right now, the Alt key doesn't do anything, and I find that Electron apps have to go out of their way to mimic native conventions, as VS Code does.

So there's less software that follows keyboard-driven conventions, so fewer users know about those conventions, creating a vicious circle. Not to mention that the bulk of your average person's "computer" usage is poking at a touchscreen phone or tablet that has no physical keys at all, just godawful on-screen keyboards.

I think the average user did know it was possible, because the hotkeys for everything were shown in the menu, and "alt-f" to open the file menu was just how things were done. Or you could click on it with the mouse, and still see the hotkeys to get back to it faster next time.

The user-hostile pattern of nested levels of mouse-maze menu, which collapse if you stray one pixel out of the required path, absolutely infuriates me. I can't imagine who thought this was a good idea or what sort of pointing device they used.

What you're really describing is bad UI design. It's not a fault with the interaction method at all. Your whole argument that "keys are well documented" can fall down if a developer doesn't bother their hole to document their keys, or to follow a standard keyboard pattern.

I completely agree it's bad UI design, but it's also become the standard. Some modern "standard" did away with buttons that look like the buttons we spent 20 years learning the look of, scroll bars that look like the scroll bars we spent 20 years learning the look of, hotkeys with underlined letters that we spent 20 years looking for and learning to speed our interaction with frequently-used programs.

It's absolutely bad UI design, but I think it's become the rule rather than the exception. It's just "prettier", according to some jerk who never used a hotkey in his life.

I understand you now. I think this has more to do with the prevalence of "touch" than mouses particularly.

> It's just "prettier", according to some jerk

Some would say "brave" and with jerk I think you're being too kind :-)