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."
...when did opinions become news??
...Counterstrike.
I've tried it. Absolutely impossible.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
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)
--
ahref=http://unk1911.blogspot.com/http://unk1911.
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
Hits it on the head..
This page cannot be displayed due to an internal error.
..and apparently knocks it out.
air and light and time and space
I'm impressed how those guys can use the keyboard to rotate around and zoom 3D graphics in realtime, and then apply some amazing pixel-sharpening processing algorithm, all by using keyboard commands.
I've often wondered how they could do this so quickly. Especially when they literally have to type everything they want into a text field on the screen. For example, "search for drivers license of all bad guys within last two days".
I mean, it's a search engine - you don't have to type "search" into the text field!!!
Articles : Mom, I think I'm a Cyborg
Posted by paul on 2005/5/20 9:24:00 (1328 reads)
Keyboards are good. Mouses are dumb.
If I was an alien looking to slowdown the technological advancement of the human race, I would have implanted into their society the things we call the keyboard and the mouse. In fact, the only personal proof I have that this was not the case is if aliens were involved they would have updated the pain by now. Like making the "shift" key a foot pedal or something.
Assuming mailicious aliens weren't involved, this isn't good news. It means we were silly enough to have invented these things ourselves. And then we were silly enough to let them "catch on". And we're silly enough to not personally diverge to a more efficient invention just in case we might later still need to know how to use this one. We humans follow a frighteningly simple herd mentality, God forbid someone jumps off a cliff and yells "free USB fobs!" - we'd be goners.
Truth is however, that with the keyboard at least - we have adapted. Our brains and fingers have optimized this abomination enough to actually get decent output. Obviously, the optimal tool would be one that can output words (actually, getting rid of words and going right to thoughts would be way better, but that is as of yet - out of scope) as fast as we can think them.
Now you might actually have been thinking the opposite. That the mouse is the more precise tool of the two. Well not for me it isn't. For artists and graphic manipulators the mouse is all that and a bag of chips - but for text people like myself, you can keep your seedy mice.
The problem with mice (which the nefarious aliens know all too well) is that its use removes your hand from the keyboard. To open a file in your favorite editor, chances are you grab the mouse, find the pointer with your eyes, move it to "file", click, move it down to "open" (hopefully not having to deal with any of those sub-menus that always seem to unpop off my screen as I'm moving down trying to get a lower entry) and once again click.
The alternative way to do this using just the keyboard (which I'm callously assuming is where your fingers already are) is to hold ALT, press F, let go of both, then hit O (thats as in "oh", not zero).
I have never written down all those operations before now and just looking at the two makes me feel stupid to have every used a mouse to open a file. The ALT-F method is no secret - why the heck don't we use it? ALT-F then O is even two different hands - it really is quite fast. My only explanation is that such keystrokes are cryptic and will require a bout or two of memorization whereas the peachy mouse-menu route hand-holds us right along the way. The mouse cursor gives us a constant bookmark of where our thought process is "I just clicked the file menu - now I'm moving to click open".
There is a nice book by Andy Clark called Natural Born Cyborgs. He makes an interesting observation that we all are already cyborgs (loosely defined as a fusion of humans and technology). His example is that if I am at your house, I may ask you "Do you know what the word poikilotherm means?". If you don't you would say "No, but we can look it up!". Upon consulting your house dictionary or your ubiquitous wifi connection, you can easily do that.
Now similarly, I might ask "Do you know what time it is?". And, at the very instant of me asking, you may not. However, the common response is to raise your wrist to your face and say "Yeah, its 4:30".
You liar. YOU did not know. Your watch knew but took credit for its perpetual temporal omniscience. I always know what time it is cuz dadburnit - I have a watch! In effect, we have extended our concept of self to include our watches - thus in Dr. Clark's claim we are cyborg. (Note that grammatically speaking, that sentence should end in "cyborgs", not "cyborg" - but if you ever watched Star Trek you'd know that cyborgs don't use contractions and often speak of th
I believe Fox News was founded in 1980.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
And you just confused the smurf out of every Mac zealot going to this story to denounce the heresy of the superiority of the keyboard.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
I got a computer to let my mouse surf the 'Net. What am I supposed to tell my mouse when he reads this article, you insensitive clod?
:wq
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
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
I do not wish vi to be seen so close to emacs lest someone think they are together. vi wouldn't be caught dead with the likes of emacs... the after prom party doesn't count there had been much drinking
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
They're stupid. As a matter of fact, GUIs are stupid too. So are command lines. If you're a REAL geek, you'll do your computer work with a punch card. If it can't be done with that, well, it must not be worth doing.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
Because mice would have been the smart way.
Thats why I write all my term papers in binary as Postscript files. My keyboard is a simple rocker switch, left for 1, right for 0. You crazy kids and your ASCII!
My other car is a Popemobile
So rather than being a general case study with broad applicability, Slashdot has just put on its front page an article that says, "I like keyboards!"
Somehow, "News for one particular nerd" just doesn't have the right ring.
Slow news day, here we come.
We're comparing shovels to screwdrivers here, folks.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Three Editors for the macintosh-kings under the a great gui,
Seven for the Unix-lords in their interface of lines,
Nine for the Windowed Men doomed to a bad gui,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Editor to rule them all, One Editor to find them,
One Editor to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
Vim is the One. Bow mortals.
(Sorry Tolkien)
Shadus
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$ALL.jpg;done
And yes, I DO use my system for video editing and photography work. I still long for Gimp to have the keyboard-ability of the SGI/Wavefront system I learned to use more than a decade ago.
Awhile ago, I bought a Fingerworks Keyboard. These things use a heat-sensing technology to allow the same surface to detect gestures, button presses, and mousing without any "pushing" required. Contact is all it takes.
It's pretty slick, and it really helps me when I'm doing somethign that requires alot of transitioning from mouse to keyboard. It also adds gesturing to any application, which is pretty damn slick. Gestures can be even faster than keyboard input.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Basically the question of keyboard vs mouse comes down to analog vs. digital. We use a keyboard to type characters because, for a computer, they are digital; there's no ascii code for "C that's looks kinda like a G". We use a mouse to do graphic art because a brush stroke is not a simple line. We use the keyboard to go forward and strafe in a FPS because it's either full-on or not, but a mouse for aiming since rate of rotation is continuously variable.
Executive Summary: The mouse is faster than the keyboard.
Or not.
Here is the article where Tognazzini describes his test. Tognazzini writes:
Note, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".
Never mind the absurdity of reporting the times to four significant digits. He said, again, "cursor keys", not "keyboard". He had the users move the text cursor with the arrow keys alone, from one "|" to the next.
Here's another way to do it, using the keyboard. Got your stopwatch?
?^$?;//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.