Keyboards are Good; Mouses are Dumb 569
An anonymous reader writes "Most emacs/vi users know this, but it seems the more I use the mouse, the less output I am making. The keyboard does seem to make much more of a mind-meld than the imprecise mouse. Paul Tyma hits it on the head."
Nice read and all, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe in some tasks. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Didn't RTFA).
Ok quick, draw me a corporate logo (Score:5, Insightful)
imprecision (Score:5, Insightful)
The mouse is better when the datasets that you are working on are not localized / scattered around the screen (it's like a cassette tape vs. cd-rom which can quickly access random parts of data without rewinding)
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ahref=http://unk1911.blogspot.com/ [slashdot.org]http://unk1911.
Not quite. (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you imagine how many times I would have had to hit 'tab' just to get to this textarea if I only had a keyboard and was using w3m or something? I shudder at the prospect.
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe, the correct answer here, like in every field, is USE THE PROPER TOOL FOR THE JOB.
Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I think that eventually... (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Your finger has very low resolution. You cannot position something very precisely with a finger on the screen no matter how sensitive the touch screen is.
2. Sticking your finger on the screen obscures your view of the very thing you are trying to point to thus making it harder.
3. Tracking your eyes suffers from a similar accuracy problem. Just try staring at a pixel on the screen and then move your eyes just enough to move exactly one pixel to the right.
The mouse is a good tool for precise positioning on screen because your hand can make very precise movements.
Next time you are undergoing surgery try asking the surgeon to direct the scalpel with his eyes.
John.
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
exactly. before everyone blows their top about vim or emacs or even bbedit, let's all take a deep breath and say:
"the right tool for the right job"
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Flogging a dead horse (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought this argument died in the 80's.
jfs
Of Course Mouses are dumb... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well duh, it depends on the nature of the tool. (Score:2, Insightful)
Try using a keyboard exclusively with Photoshop. Oops!
The tool you use dictates the hand action.
Article's a bit misguided... (Score:2, Insightful)
However, it takes little to no tweaking of his "Cyborg" argument to say that mice are superior when using CAD and playing most computer games. After a certain duration at any of these activities, the mouse simply becomes an extension of the human body, and little to no thought is required for our brains to act immediately to what we want to do on the computer, be it dodging a rocket or designing an object.
Keyboards and mice are not inherently dumb or smart, each is simply more adept at different tasks.
Re:Maybe in some tasks. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, the keyboard and mouse are both useful interface devices. IMO The efforts to make everything point-and-click are misguided, because they throw out a very powerful interface device. I usually consider it a Windows disease, because Windows is more likely to aim for a least-common-denominator (It's a design choice). Programs like AutoCAD that grew from a Unix Workstation mentality assume that the user is intelligent, and provide power for those that want it. Autodesk Inventor seems much more stifling to me, because the interface (Created for Windows by Windows users) is designed to force me to use it their way, not mine, and they want me to click on things with the mouse.
Mouse = analog; keyboard = digital (Score:3, Insightful)
Some input is analog - like drawing a picture. Some is analog but maybe gratuitously so - like dragging or resizing a window.
Mice are great for analog input, and not so great for digital.
So why are mice used so much? Because it is easy to train primates to whack the right paddles to perform certain well-defined tasks. Not because such an interface is most efficient for an adept user.
It is true that Windows has a hideous alternate digital input method using tab and enter. That's equivalent to unary.
It is not clear to me that *any* current keyboard input convention is as efficient as it might be. Certainly not Emacs, which makes you escape the ordinary thing you do (navigating) in order to facilitate something you do less often (inserting stuff at a new place).
All these ergonomic issues are amenable to evaluation by experiment, but the easy-to-implement experiments all involve short learning periods and previously unexposed subjects. Or, worse still, subjects who have already been exposed to a particular way of doing things. Such naive experiments will tend always to support "use a mouse, just like Windows."
No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
We're comparing shovels to screwdrivers here, folks.
Re:Yeah? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd agree with the assertion that a word processor, spreadsheet, or other primarily textual application is definitely easier to use with a keyboard and control strokes than with a mouse -- if you're willing to overcome the initial learning curve. I am, but a surprising number of people aren't. Personally, it annoys the holy living shit out of me if a word processor requires me to use a mouse for anything at all. Sometimes, I'll use the mouse for selecting a field in a dialogue box, but this is less often because there are a lot of fields (legitimate reason), than because the UI engineer came up with a stupid tab order.
For graphics apps, on the other hand, the mouse is going to be the primary tool. Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw, and so on would be virtually unusable for real work without a mouse. That said, I use keyboard shortcuts extensively in all of the above.
The solution, IMHO, is to make sure that you can do as much as possible with either the mouse or the keyboard, and let the user decide which one works best for particular tasks in his or her own unique workflow.
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:emacs.. vi.. FIGHT! (Score:3, Insightful)
The apple, option(alt) and control keys are used quite a bit in situations where a Windows user would be right-clicking.
I use the keyboard much more frequently when using a Mac than I do with Windows.
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Still as true today as back in the old Usenet days when people would waste their lives argueing over CLI vs. GUI. I guess there's a whole new generation that hasn't figured it out yet.
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
I agree with the parent: use the right tool for the right job.
Re:Can you click a link with yer keyboard? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Of course... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or another example, if you're already in Windows explorer it probably makes more sense to drag & drop files with the mouse, whereas if you're in a cmd session, it probably makes more sense to type: copy *.* dest as long as the paths weren't too far off.
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One activity where this ISN'T true... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Maybe in some tasks. (Score:2, Insightful)
For the CAD program, I totally agree. Some kind of analog input device makes the most sense.
But for browsing the web, the keyboard is much more viable. If you use Firefox's interactive search feature (where merely typing text will scroll you to where that text first appears -- you may have to turn on "Begin Finding When You Begin Typing" in the preferences), you can navigate to most links (not all links, but most) really, really quickly. Yes, you have to do a bit of thinking about what to type in order to hone in on what you're looking for, but often that's trivial.
For example, let's say I want to go to google then from there go to the "Froogle" link and do a Froogle search. Let's say I want to do it right here in this web browser window where I am typing this message. I hit Command-T (I'm using a Mac; substitute the appropriate modifier (control, alt, whatever) on your own platform) to open a tab. This puts the focus on the location bar, so I type "google.com" and hit Enter, which brings up http://google.com/ [google.com] . Next, because Firefox isn't as keyboard oriented as it could be, the easiest way to take focus off the search field and allow interactive search is to hit Command-F (find) and then Escape (which cancels find and puts focus back on the text -- not the field) of the web page. Then I type "froo" (actually just "fr" is enough) and hit Enter again, and I am on the Froogle section of Google. Then I type "tennis shoe" (or whatever I'm searching for) and hit Enter again, and I've done a Froogle search.
Let's say I like the "Adidas Barricade II" shoe (I don't, but I can't control that all tennis shoes these days look like plastic bananas with bad paint jobs). If I want to see the "Adidas Barricade II", I just type "bar" and hit Enter. Now let's say I want to buy one of these ghastly things. I'm stuck at this point because the Firefox people didn't put in any keyboard-based way to select graphical buttons -- it's only possible to hone in on text-based links at present. So I can't click on "Add to Shopping Cart". But this doesn't mean the keyboard wouldn't be a reasonable tool for the job. It's just that the Firefox people were focused on making the mouse work for everything, so they didn't make a provision for this.
In fact, that serves to illustrate a point: lots of this keyboard navigation could be easier if the Firefox authors (and authors of lots of other software) didn't appear to think that mouse is the only real priority. I'm not saying that the mouse is bad, but I do think we suffer from a little bit of groupthink such that we design user interfaces to be solely mouse-based when the keyboard would be equally good or better at certain tasks. (I will not deny, though, that there is an advantage to visual controls, which is that you know that they're there; with the keyboard, you have to know that keystrokes exist, because it isn't like there is a keyboard that lights up all the keys that do useful things based on the context, although if there were, it might be a cool gadget to have!)
Re:or not... (Score:4, Insightful)
Executive Summary: The mouse is faster than the keyboard.
Or not.
Here [asktog.com] is the article where Tognazzini describes his test. Tognazzini writes:
Note, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".
Never mind the absurdity of reporting the times to four significant digits. He said, again, "cursor keys", not "keyboard". He had the users move the text cursor with the arrow keys alone, from one "|" to the next.
Here's another way to do it, using the keyboard. Got your stopwatch?
?^$?;//s/|/e/gSix seconds, independent of the length of the paragraph or number of changes. (That's ed(1); "ed is the standard text editor".)
Even if you constrain the user to move the cursor to each "|", one by one, the keyboard is faster: for instance, in vi(1), "{/|^[re" and then repeat "n." But why would you make the user do that? That's not just ignoring the utility of the keyboard, but of the computer itself. So the mouse is faster than the arrow keys at performing task X forty-two times? If you use the computer as a fucking computer instead of crippling it to the level of a typewriter, then you don't do it forty-two times; you do it once. Tognazzini's test suffers from Mac System 6 tunnel vision.
It might be argued that automated repetition defeats the true purpose of the test -- that it isn't about replacing "|" with "e" forty-two times, that that isn't a real-world editing task but just a stand-in for forty-two different tasks.
Better for the keyboard! A keyboard does have keys other than arrow keys -- it has keys that bear the very same characters that appear in text. There is an obvious correspondence between a character on the keyboard and a character in the document, one about as "intuitive" as you can get. This lets the user press the keys to locate the corresponding character in the document, either individually, or sequentially to magically form composites we call "words" that have meaning within the user's task.
Using the keyboard, the user can have the computer find the correct location, rather than being forced to do it himself, visually, with the possibility of error. What if Tognazzini's test had not involved finding the vertical bars, which are visually distinctive in text, but, say, replacing "blue" with "green" throughout a ten-page document? How many instances would have been missed? Do you want to cut the blue wire, or the green one? Are you sure?
(Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say "|" was visually distinctive? Here you are, user: take your mouse and change every "|" in this Helvetica paragraph. Don't touch any "I" or "l" or "1", though.)
The mouse ignores the semantic content of the characters and symbols, words and keywords, blocks and sentences.... It even ignores the symbols themselves; it wanders haphazardly over a picture of the document (a static picture, if you're lucky; ever try using a mouse to select something that doesn't hold still because the window is being written to?)
Revised Executive Summary: The mouse is faster than the keyboard that has nothing but four arrow keys, when errors don't matter.
Re:One activity where this ISN'T true... (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Touchscreen for desktop PC, though.
AC: It doesn't recognize the absolute input from the stylus and so the screen just goes nuts whenever you try to aim.
That is a specific problem of software compatibility. Once fixed (such as by adjusting the pseudo-mouse driver to emulate absolute inputs for a given screen size), you can effortlessly score as many FPS headshots as you desire.
However, as has been pointed out, an aimbot will be even more accurate with even less effort.
How much importance can you attach.... (Score:3, Insightful)