I don't install FreeBSD on a bare machine much these days, but I had the need to do a bare install yesterday. I was completely frustrated when I got to the "Manual" partition section of bsdinstall. Everything had gone fine up to that point, but then I could not create my partitions since the arrow keys used for navigation did not work in the naive sense. Going to the handbook (on another system) did not help. Finally, searching gmane.org for previous discussions about this problem in freebsd-questions revealed to me that the TAB key was necessary to properly navigate the partition creation section of the "Manual" choice (for experts!). D'oh! Did I feel stupid! Please, please, change the documentation (Chapter 2.5 and related) in the handbook at least, and perhaps provide better help assistance in bsdinstall so that the use of the TAB key is mentioned. Most people use the SPACE bar, the RETURN key, and the arrow keys, but the TAB key is not one of the first things that lept to my forebrain. Warren Block has responded to me in an email. What he says may be indicative: "Curses and dialog(1) are known for their somewhat confusing keyboard usage. I find the disk partitioning in bsdinstall confusing also, but have not had any inspiration on making it less confusing. A bug report might or might not help. Devin Teske was working on improving bsdinstall, but I have not been following the progress." I hope this bug report will result in clearer and better experiences for users who find using bsdinstall a bit confusing and less than intuitive. Thank you.
Created attachment 200400 [details] Add reference to the "Tab" key I haven't found many examples where this is necessary, so I've suggested putting it in the partitioning section you mention. Would this help?
Committed. Thanks!
A commit references this bug: Author: crees Date: Tue Apr 16 10:02:52 UTC 2019 New revision: 52928 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/52928 Log: Give a hint to curses navigation It is not immediately obvious to all users how to move the cursor around the partitioning section in bsdinstall, and this kind of thing can put people off very quickly. PR: docs/197645 Submitted by: web@umich.edu Changes: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall/chapter.xml