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Keyboards are Good; Mouses are Dumb

Posted by timothy on from the trackballs-are-savants dept.

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."

16 of 569 comments (clear)

  1. Nice read and all, but... by inkdesign · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...when did opinions become news??

    1. Re:Nice read and all, but... by ZephyrXero · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, I mean pure text/command line/keyboard only is great if you're a programmer. But I need a mouse for doing art/graphics and it's much easier than having to tab 30 times till the correct hyperlink is selected in my browser...guess it just depends on what it is you're doing ;)

      --
      "A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
    2. Re:Nice read and all, but... by Frymaster · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Yeah, I mean pure text/command line/keyboard only is great if you're a programmer. But I need a mouse for doing art/graphics and it's much easier than having to tab 30 times till the correct hyperlink is selected in my browser.

      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"

      --

      2 1337 4 u!

    3. Re:Nice read and all, but... by shotfeel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "the right tool for the right job"

      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.

    4. Re:Nice read and all, but... by Tiger4 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unfortunately, there are programmers using CLI out there developing tools for GUI users. The GUIs function, sorta, kinda, after a fashion, but the programmers never have to actually use them, so they don't understand all the complaints and whining over how crappy the GUIs are. This should sound really familiar to Linux developers. If it doesn't, perhaps you are POTP. The Apple HIG have been out for, what, about 20 years now?

      --
      Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
  2. Maybe in some tasks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

    1. Re:Maybe in some tasks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I make my living with a CAD program. While I wouldn't want to use it without the mouse, I am much faster than many of the people around me because I use the keyboard more. Rather than hunting around for a little tool button to click, I just type the command with my left hand. It's faster and it keeps my spacial focus on my drawing instead of on the interface. Like the blurb says (can't read the article), the keyboard is more of a mind-meld, because a touch-typist doesn't have to think about typing, it just happens. The best mouse user still has to look at where there mouse is going in order to be able to click the right thing. I shouldn't have to look at the interface, only the thing I'm working on.

      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.

  3. Ok quick, draw me a corporate logo by theurge14 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Use Illustrator and only your keyboard. Go!

  4. imprecision by unk1911 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    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)

    --
    ahref=http://unk1911.blogspot.com/http://unk1911.b logspot.com/>

  5. Not quite. by Daniel+Baumgarten · · 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.

    --
    "Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
  6. Yeah? by Valar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Try using photoshop without a mouse.

    Or maybe, the correct answer here, like in every field, is USE THE PROPER TOOL FOR THE JOB.

    --

    ====
    Crudely Drawn Games
    1. Re:Yeah? by Angst+Badger · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's what I was thinking.

      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.

      --
      Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
  7. Of course... by rasafras · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  8. Of Course Mouses are dumb... by billnapier · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because mice would have been the smart way.

  9. No kidding by lawpoop · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The mouse is a selection tool, a filter. The keyboard is a creative combinatorial tool. There is a reason why every modern desktop computer has both. Actually there are probably several reasons.

    We're comparing shovels to screwdrivers here, folks.

    --
    Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
    -- Pablo Picasso
  10. Re:or not... by kps · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Executive Summary: The mouse is faster than the keyboard.

    Or not.

    Here is the article where Tognazzini describes his test. Tognazzini writes:

    The test I did I did several years ago, frankly, I entered into for the express purpose of letting cursor keys win, just to prove they could in some cases be faster than the mouse.

    Note, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".

    I typed in a paragraph of text, then replaced every instance of an "e" with a vertical bar (|). The test subject's task was to replace every | with an "e." .... The average time for the cursor keys was 99.43 seconds, for the mouse, 50.22 seconds.

    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/g

    Six 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.