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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."
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.