Slashdot Mirror
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."
display -dither -despeckle -gamma 1.8 -sharpen 2 0.5 thisSecretImage.jpg
...and I'm essentially done. Takes less time to type that than opening the damn download program, and the "interface" is just as usable (at least it is to me).
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
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.
Being a blind computer user, I don't use the mouse at all--unless I am controlling the mouse pointer with the keyboard. I primarily use IE in conjunction with Window-Eyes as a screen-reading application. With this combination, I can very easily and quickly move to various types of controls on web pages etc. Most people who have observed me browsing the web etc. say I navigate through web pages much faster than they do. Granted, I am using some specialized software to do this but I don't see why someone couldn't write some scripts to do some of the same tasks that my screen-reader does to simplify web navigation.
Imagine trying to use a CAD program, or even browse a web-forum without a mouse.
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."
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Awhile ago, I bought a Fingerworks Keyboard. These things use a heat-sensing technology to allow the same surface to detect gestures, button presses, and mousing without any "pushing" required. Contact is all it takes.
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.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Basically the question of keyboard vs mouse comes down to analog vs. digital. We use a keyboard to type characters because, for a computer, they are digital; there's no ascii code for "C that's looks kinda like a G". We use a mouse to do graphic art because a brush stroke is not a simple line. We use the keyboard to go forward and strafe in a FPS because it's either full-on or not, but a mouse for aiming since rate of rotation is continuously variable.