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."
Most people feel that way (Score:3, Interesting)
If what we are talking about is hot keys, then there is some speed gain, but I have found that for most select cut and paste operations (even in text editors) the mouse/hot key combination seems to be fastest.
Oh and the article is already down.
Re:Keyboard vs. Mouse (Score:3, Interesting)
But only if you're using the IBM Model M. Modern keyboards just don't have the structural integrity to cause damage to anything but themselves.
WordPerfect 5.1 (Score:3, Interesting)
locate -r \/usr\/stupidity.* (Score:5, Interesting)
I do that stuff all the time. I stopped using windows altogether about two years ago, every day I still find myself using the GUI less and less. Sure some things are irreplaceable, but for most stuff -- I want to download an image gallery? I can waste five minutes setting up a download in d4x or I can type something like
for ALL in `seq -w firstvar lastvar`;do wget http://somesite/gallery/DSC$ALL.jpg;done [somesite]
And yes, I DO use my system for video editing and photography work. I still long for Gimp to have the keyboard-ability of the SGI/Wavefront system I learned to use more than a decade ago.
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
On a more related note, back in 1988 when I first started working with GUIs, I felt that they helped me become much more productive. Of course, at the time I was doing 3D CAD stuff and composing music almost full time. Very little typing required for either of those tasks. However, after I got a job in IT officially in 1997, I started working with CLI more and more. I find that I write better and faster in a streamlined text editor like Emacs (start the flame war) than I do in Word or OpenOffice.org Writer. Most of the time I write everything in Emacs and then read the resultant TXT file into OpenOffice.org Writer and format later. But I will say that I've noticed that with the resolution increases, mouse input devices have become less efficient. Back when my top resolution was 640x400 (Atari ST monochrome) It was easy to hit menus and icons spot on. These days the mouse pointer seems to be much harder to position because it hasn't really grown in relation to the higher resolutions. So I find myself just missing a menu or clicking the adjacent window widget more frequently than I did in the old days. Maybe what we need is larger mouse pointers and better active areas on GUI objects...
Re:1980 (Score:1, Interesting)
This is incredible. (Score:1, Interesting)
I dunno, I guess being a Mac user (and truly realize that the ergonomics of the Mac key commands are much easier to use) this is known outright. Mac users worth a damn uses key commands as second nature, and for nearly everything. And the article is incorrect in saying that "For artists and graphic manipulators the mouse is all that and a bag of chips - but for text people like myself, you can keep your seedy mice." Every graphic professional I know (admin at design firms, and an old production person) uses key commands as if the mouse didn't exist, accept of course unless you are actually drawing something (Wacom?) or outlining something (Wacom?). That statement is so wrong that I have to take the rest of the article as BS.
Of course key commands are better, faster, easier, no hand-eye coordination gymnastics, etc... Yup, BS AND stupid.
Re:Not quite. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe in some tasks. (Score:4, Interesting)
Even with one, CAD users are likely to complain. Take my wife, for example. She used to work a lot with CAD systems in several civil engineering offices. She still complains about the stupid 1-, 2- and even 3-button mice, saying how nice her old 16-button mice were.
Of course, she had software that would let her quickly map any of a zillion library functions to any button. She even liked to demo using this with a text editor. The mapping had all the common edit operations mapped to buttons. She could rearrange text faster than you could follow with your eyes, just using the 16-button mouse.
Funny thing; she now has a Mac with a trackpad input that uses a pen. She still complains about the lack of buttons. She has to keep putting the pen down and switching to the keyboard to type a command, then picking the pen up.
"What a waste of time! They knew how to do it better 20 years ago."
Split the difference, Fingerworks keyboard (Score:4, Interesting)
It's pretty slick, and it really helps me when I'm doing somethign that requires alot of transitioning from mouse to keyboard. It also adds gesturing to any application, which is pretty damn slick. Gestures can be even faster than keyboard input.
analog vs digital (Score:4, Interesting)
Mouse is seldom the proper tool. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say that a mouse is seldom the right tool for the right job. You can't even really do all the browsing stuff with a mouse, as it often involves some other form of data entry. Further, since clicking is so very primitive in a web environment, the rudimentary clicking that a tablet is capable of makes it just about as good for exactly what mice are used for most (browsing).
It's a hybrid that'll get you by.
data input rate (Score:3, Interesting)
Ignoring simulatneous key presses (trust me, the number will be enormous even without them), the average workplace typer can achieve 50 wpm (http://www.testedok.com/typingtest.html [testedok.com]). At 5 characters per word (same site), that comes to 250 characters per minute, or 4.17 per second. With a set of characters including the alphabet (26), punctuation (11), numbers (10), we have
(26+11+10)^4.17 = 9,389,621 distinct inputs possible per second
The mouse input question is significantly more difficult. One possible approximation of data input is clicking on distinct points on the screen. Just by playing around with a mouse, I believe I can hit any point on a 250x250 grid on the screen each second. I can mark that point with, say, 1 of 3 distinct button presses.
(250*250*3)^1 = 187,500
Keyboard wins by 50 times, apparently.
One can pretty quickly see, though, that no human can possibly generate this much data. Typing words at that rate is using no where near the complete set of possible data, and I can't imagine any useful situation where a person could be click ing on one of 187,500 points every second...
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Ask Tog: Apple re$earch says mouse is better (Score:2, Interesting)
See his 1991 book "Tog on Interface", where he claims in the 80s Apple performed $50M in tests that showed that people consistently reported believing that keyboarding (using shortcuts, etc.) was faster than mousing, yet the stopwatch consistently showed that mousing was faster than keyboarding.
His explanation for this is that deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function, and that this decision is not only boring, but that the user experiences near-amnesia in the approximately two seconds needed to remember the chord keystroke. On the other hand, Tog also argues that two-handed chords (think the handy cut-and-paste CTRL/C
Around page 180, where in fact he discusses Raskin's Cat interface and the decision to use a single dedicated key for operations such as "Find", Tog admits was actually fifty times faster than the Mac's mouse-move.
This reminds me of the old joke about voice interface word processors: "Up, up, up, left, left, left, left, no right, stop, yes, right
there
Want to learn something? Go Google "therbligs".
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:1, Interesting)
There's a difference between adding mouse support the Emacs way, and adding real mouse support. Emacs just added a menubar, and put all the existing commands in there as menuitems. It's no wonder Emacs users (like me) never use the mouse: their mouse support is pathetic.
If you don't see the difference: if you wanted to give find-file on Linux a graphical user interface, this would be like giving the user an xterm with menus called "grep" and "find". Compare that (thankfully imaginary) program to File->Find... on your nearest Mac.
(Here's where somebody always pops up and says "But grep/find are better because I can string together a bunch of commands that do
The keyboard is really a horrid device, that's been shoehorned into far, far too many tasks. In the long term, it's the best solution for exactly one problem -- entering text.
If you want recent examples of graphical programming, look at a Mac (Interface Builder, Automator, Bindings -- you can do quite a lot with no text), or even Labview (for a somewhat primitive programming language). It's not new, though: in 1968 the RAND corporation's GRAIL was a completely keyboardless programming system.
Heck, look at how many tools programmers use today to visualize their code -- from IDEs that show outline-views of their code, to tools that generate "pretty" versions of their interfaces, to GUI designers, to UML drawings. It's incredible that despite all signs pointing to "we need graphical tools to build programs", some people still insist that programs need to be written in text.
I'm OK with using a keyboard for typing in words (like this comment), but I've been programming for 20 years and it's time programming moved beyond "if (foo) { bar(); }" (with slight syntax differences depending on language).
Re:Nice read and all, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
My brother is does CAD full-time and apparently he never really touches the keyboard anymore unless it is to type in some text.
Clicking/draging/RMBing is just a lot faster in CAD if you know what you're doing.
Just try it yourself:
l [space] 10,10 [space] @100,0 [space] @0,100 [space] c [enter]
versus
click, click, click, click, click
Re:WRONG (Score:2, Interesting)