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Keyboards are Good; Mouses are Dumb
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."
...when did opinions become news??
Imagine trying to use a CAD program, or even browse a web-forum without a mouse. The mouse still wins in some applications.
(Didn't RTFA).
Use Illustrator and only your keyboard. Go!
I agree completely. The mouse is imprecise and takes too long, requires very good hand/eye coordination. When I have to work on a repetitive task I can either write a macro or have the exact sequence of key-strokes down and do the job much faster.
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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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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.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
Try using photoshop without a mouse.
Or maybe, the correct answer here, like in every field, is USE THE PROPER TOOL FOR THE JOB.
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Crudely Drawn Games
He is sinply assuming that all anybody ever does is navigate file menus and some word processing. Choosing icons from a desktop, clicking buttons, things like that are not just eye candy... they matter. And for the things I do, multimedia editing and stuff, the mouse is more than essential. I agree fully with the poster that pointed out this is a thinly veiled 3 emacs news item, and rather terrible news. HEY, GEE GUYS, KEYBOARDS ARE BETTER THAN MICE FOR WORD PROCESSING.
webpage
This is pretty unlikely. There are a number of reasons why touch screens and eye input are inaccurate:
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.
I thought this argument died in the 80's.
jfs
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Because mice would have been the smart way.
Let me lay it out for you nice and simple. If you choose to use tools that work best with a keyboard then the keyboard will be most efficient. If your tool works better with mouse input then a mouse will be more effiecient.
Try using a keyboard exclusively with Photoshop. Oops!
The tool you use dictates the hand action.
Using the best knowledge of today to create the problems of tomorrow.
TFA only uses typing as the example of interacting with the computer, in this case, with text editors and using the keyboard shortcut instead of using the mouse and clicking on File-Save. His article works great in this sense, because the keyboard is naturally the most effective tool for the task of typing.
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.
Most input from human to computer is digital - selecting from a menu of items; selecting a particular window; clicking OK; entering text, etc.
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."
We're comparing shovels to screwdrivers here, folks.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
Albuquerque PC
Why yes! I recently upgraded to one of those spiffy new keyboards with an 'enter' key. Hex keypads are out, I tell you! This is the wave of the future.
The mouse is the reason I do not play games on a console. If she thinks a mouse is imprecise, she should try an Xbox controller. :yuck:
Executive Summary: The mouse is faster than the keyboard.
Or not.
Here 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.
AC: Have you ever tried playing an FPS on a Tablet PC? Difficult stuff.
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.
... to the opinions of people who use words like 'mouses' ?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)