One Week: No Mouse, Just Keyboard 364
jfruhlinger writes "Anyone in tech has heard from grousing old-timers who believe the GUI was the beginning of the end of civilization and that EMacs keyboard shortcuts are all the interface anyone should need. But can someone use a modern consumer OS without laying hands on a mouse? Kevin Purdy gave it a week-long try."
Re:Windows? (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows is FAR better than Linux in the run-the-GUI-with-keyboard-only department. Sure, Linux has a better console environment, but these keyboard jockeys utterly failed at keyboard jockeying their graphical programs.
I liked the Amiga's solution: Holding down one of the Amiga keyboard buttons turned the cursor keys into a virtual mouse, with Enter or Space or something representing the mouse buttons. A very simple solution when some program didn't have a keyboard shortcut and it wasn't worth grabbing the rodent.
linux has keyboard mousing by default (Score:3, Interesting)
In soviet linux the keyboard is the mouse:
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/movecursor.html [tuxfiles.org]
As a blind Windows/Linux user... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also possible to use a computer soully with a refreshable braille display device, though it gets aggrivating, and there's no way in hell I'd do it for a week.
On the Linux side of things, the accessibility is far worse than in Windows, but Gnome provides a lot of the same types of keyboard navigation mechanisms as Windows (Orca [gnome.org] doesn't work on KDE, sadly).
Re:Windows is the best for it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Even though Mac OS and OS X both have extensive keyboard controls, neither is possible to use exclusively with a keyboard. I've found Windows to be the most keyboard friendly GUI OS. Which I think is kind of odd ...