Slashdot Mirror
'I Stopped Using a Computer Mouse For a Week and It Was Amazing' (vice.com)
Slashdot reader dmoberhaus writes via Motherboard: Over the course of the next five days, I relied solely on my keyboard to navigate the web and my local hard drive. It was a limited form of digital detox, a way of trying to understand the way people used computers before the computer mouse became widely adopted for commercial machines in the 1980s. If I had to describe the experience of computing without a mouse in a word, I'd say it was fucking fantastic. It took about a day and a half before I had memorized all the shortcuts that I would be using on a regular basis. All the other important shortcuts I wrote down on a notepad I kept on my desk for reference. I also had to do a little set up for certain applications, such as Gmail, which doesn't have many of its most useful shortcuts turned on by default, such as the ability to select all unread messages or the ability to move between messages with only a single keystroke.
By the end of my week without a mouse, many of the shortcuts were already beginning to feel like second nature. I found that they saved me a ton of time, especially on tedious tasks like deleting emails. Indeed, one shortcut evangelist suggests that switching to keyboard shortcuts in Gmail saved him as much as 60 hours per year. If nothing else, it made the experience of using a laptop way less miserable because I didn't have to touch the touchpad. [...] Admittedly, not everything was rosy without a mouse. I haunt a number of forums and found it a little tedious to have to ctrl+f whatever item I wanted to "click" on. Similarly, doing anything that involved image editing in Photoshop was basically impossible. I don't game on my PC, but from what I hear, this would also be quite difficult without a mouse.
By the end of my week without a mouse, many of the shortcuts were already beginning to feel like second nature. I found that they saved me a ton of time, especially on tedious tasks like deleting emails. Indeed, one shortcut evangelist suggests that switching to keyboard shortcuts in Gmail saved him as much as 60 hours per year. If nothing else, it made the experience of using a laptop way less miserable because I didn't have to touch the touchpad. [...] Admittedly, not everything was rosy without a mouse. I haunt a number of forums and found it a little tedious to have to ctrl+f whatever item I wanted to "click" on. Similarly, doing anything that involved image editing in Photoshop was basically impossible. I don't game on my PC, but from what I hear, this would also be quite difficult without a mouse.
Some people are just bent on making more work for themselves.
...who needs a mouse
Good job, you've made things harder on yourself and decreased your efficiency, and now want to do one of those 'I don't even own a TV' type brags. I typed this comment with one hand, but I didn't write an article about it because no one cares.
No keyboard next, and hopefully permanently so we don't read about this stupidity. Mouse exists for a reason.
You became a VI user and ditched Emacs?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
If I had to describe the experience of computing without a mouse in a word, I'd say it was fucking fantastic.
The mouse is more intuitive for the person who is unskilled at the software they are using. The keyboard is more efficient for everyone else, sometimes substantially so. It's astonishing how much software intended for repetitive data entry is not designed better around the keyboard.
Why are people so bad at learning to use a product they spend so much money acquiring? Would you buy a car and then signal turns manually because you couldn't be bothered to learn to use the lever that operates the turn signals?
What a pretentious douche.
I grew up using computers before they had mouses.
I do think they serve a valuable purpose, chiefly for "random access" style selection and movement, such as in a modelling program, paint program, or other such things where a keyboard isn't the right tool for the job.
However, they are WAY overused by most people. I am always seeing people take actions in a program that are objectively much slower than can be done with a keyboard. Sometimes I feel like they approach 1/10th the speed they could. It's surprising to see this. Use the mouse when the mouse is better, but when it's dramatically slower and requires taking your hands off the keyboard for things that don't require or benefit from that, then don't!
I vividly remember remember buying a Commodore 1351 mouse for my Commodore 64 in the late 1980s for use with GEOS. In high school, having this device that allowed my humble cobbled-together 64 to have a GUI with a mouse was so exciting I slept with the box next to my bed.
Yes I was that pathetic in high school.
(Still am. Pathetic, not in high school)
Mostly random stuff.
>"If I had to describe the experience of computing without a mouse in a word, I'd say it was fucking fantastic."
Well, it is not so fantastic for lots of things. I have used just about every interface- touchscreens, lightpens, digitizer tablets, voice, eye control, alternative keyboards, touchpads, joysticks, trackballs, VR, you name it (and yes, using computers before there were such things a mice). I find a combination of mouse AND keyboard for navigating and control to be the best, over just about any other combination, for the majority of uses. Only one or the only the other, not so much.
In any case, if you like keyboard use, you should try installing Claws as your Email client- it is extremely keyboard friendly (because it is designed that way) and yet works great with a mouse, too. It is nice that there are programs that let you work they way you want to work. https://www.claws-mail.org/
Depends on your tasks. If you limit yourself to simple tasks, they can be accomplished simply.
Some tools require pointing devices. This is a hard requirement, not a superficial one. For instance, I do a significant amount of multimedia work. This would be impossible without a pointing device of some kind. Also, dealing with certain types of multi-tasking between multiple virtual environments would become an absolute pain in the ass.
Also, requiring having a cheat sheet on your desk just to list keyboard shortcuts? This goes to show just how insanely unintuitive they are to begin with. Yeah, programs started with keyboards and some shortcuts are actual shortcuts... But to the person that said they saved 60 hours a week in Gmail, I ask them this plain and simple: WHAT THEY FUCK ARE YOU EVEN DOING THAT TAKES 60 HOURS TO BEGIN WITH!?
A hybrid environment is best. I'm not saying keyboard shortcuts are terrible. I'm just saying they're absolutely terrible from a UX perspective, but used properly are good tools for power users, and power users only.
The mouse pre-dates the GUI you probably keyboard-navigated and definitely pre-dates the world wide web. So, your 'experience' is not one that would have been shared by anyone in the '80s or the early '90s.
Now if you'd tried to run WordPerfect in DOS on a 486DX2/50 with a green screen and memorised _those_ keyboard shortcuts then, yes, you would have had some '80s experience right there. Or try to load a third-party DOS expanded memory manager. Or just managing DOS memory (gee that was fun).
Why would anyone want to use a text editor that is not vi?
The next step for the idiot "power user".
I never used a mouse with DOS. Now I will shift + tab to fill in the title of this post.
"> /var/mail/acoward" typed on a keyboard saves me a LOT of time deleting my emails.
I started on computers before the mouse and back then the popular word processor was Wordstar and it had it's own set of Ctrl- keys for navigation and many functions. Many of the app's of the day and games copied the Wordstar navigation keys and once you learned them you could move around faster than with a mouse. Even when GUI's started appearing many app's the key to working fast was knowing the keyboard commands, it's a lot faster leaving your hands on the keyboard than always having to grab a mouse especially for menu commands. Now all this touch screen stuff and even more time and moving about than even a mouse. Keeping your hands on the keyboard with app's putting keyboard equivalents of menu commands is fast way to work as far as I'm concerned.
This article really isn't all that interesting. There is really barely anything there. The topic should be "I needed a blog post and had nothing better to write about" It would be interesting to compare different OS's. Does Windows, Mac or Linux work better with a keyboard? Do different web browsers handle shortcuts better? Can I configure a certain OS to handle keyboard shortcuts more productively? It may be interesting to explore the keyboard only topic. Maybe it is easier for some to use only keyboard. It's a great topic but this is just a boring blog post about someone's very limited experiment
Sent from my TARDIS
I think this experiment is pretty silly overall, I mean, we invented the mouse because it makes it easier to use a computer.
However,
I don't game on my PC, but from what I hear, this would also be quite difficult without a mouse.
That depends on the game. Some games are much better with a Xbox controller connected to your PC.
That said, word processing without a mouse is substantially more fluid, when you use an editor you know how to operate. The mouse is disruptive to the workflow of writing anything really, be it text like a post, or longer writing, programming, etc. If there's a lot of keyboarding in the activity, any action that requires using the mouse is disruptive IMHO.
All you need.
This is widely known, or at least was 20-25 years ago when I started in IT. It used to be said that reaching for a mouse cost the user 2-3 seconds of productivity each time. The problem is with the vast number of applications used today, each with it’s own custom shortcuts or no shortcuts at all, it’s far more difficult than it was then to memorize every shortcut.
My question is how do people avoid picking up keyboard shortcuts and using keyboard navigation in the first place?
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Sent from my iPad.
If you asked Slashdot in 1986 (after the Mac had been around a while) about the value of mouses, users would howl with laughter and make it perfectly clear that "Real men don't use mouses!"
This here must be a new generation of Slashdotters. RIP to those mouse haters.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I'm switching to a tablet - the slate and chalkboard kind!
I gues this makes me an uber geek! /s
>"If I had to describe the experience of computing without a mouse in a word, I'd say it was fucking fantastic."
That's not a word, that's two words for the description, and maybe four if you want the entire phrase.
Congratulations, you've discovered the very reason that GUIs exist in the first place: not everyone is capable of memorizing all those necessary keyboard shortcuts. Memorizing things is my kryptonite. I struggled in those days, and I still struggle in instances where a UI designer fails at his job. Don't you DARE try to rewind the clock for the rest of us... I will discover your kryptonite and leave it under your pillow!
First off, the mouse (and touchpad) is overused. As you've discovered, you can interact much more efficiently with a keyboard. The worst possible interaction is having to continuously switch back and forth between input methods. There's a reason for that and I'll explain. I've written on this before (and I've never seen much discussion about it), but I'll go ahead and expound on it.
The mouse is a virtual representation INSIDE the computing environment. You control a virtual construct (the pointer) on the display using a device in our world. Because the representation is virtual, you have to synchronize your brain with the pointer every time you begin using it. That includes when you switch from the keyboard to the mouse. That's because it is a visual representation - you must see the pointer and watch it to control it. This is something subconscious, but each person has developed a "synchronization" pattern or habit for mouse use. It's a natural thing that has to occur to try and improve the inherit inefficiency. Most people will move the mouse pointer in some way to try to locate it visually - spotting a moving object is much more efficient than a static object (plus many programs hide mouse pointer when the user starts typing, and only show it again when it is moved). This synchronization has to happen before you can position the mouse on the widget you want to interact with. I suppose some people use other techniques, like parking the mouse somewhere relative to where they last used it. I notice that I do tend to park the mouse off of the thing I'm typing in automatically. However you will find you move the mouse in some typical way to locate it visually and connect with it.
Because visual processing is one of the most expensive senses that our brain deals with, having to constantly synchronize visually with a mouse pointer is a relatively "expensive" process in terms of the neurons firing to make use of it.
So now the keyboard... the computer keyboard is the exact opposite. It is a physical construct that represents the computer environment in the real world. There is a key labeled "A" that when pressed triggers the letter "A" in the computer environment. Because the keyboard exists in our physical world it is much more natural for us to interact with it - it is "real". We also do a subconscious synchronization every time we go to use the keyboard, however since it is a physical object, we use the sense of touch (and often vision, but peripherally). The great thing is this can occur without having to stare intently at the keyboard. So, if you pay close attention, you will find you do some synchronization pattern every time you go to type. Try it sometime. Take your hands off the keyboard, close your eyes, and go to type something. For me, I feel for the edge of my laptop with the outside edges of my palms (the little finger sides). I also notice I feel for the left side of the spacebar with my left thumb and the left edge of the keyboard with my left little finger. This all happens quickly and without thinking - we just know how our keyboards feel. That is because our brains are wired to interact with spatial objects, and the keyboard is exactly that.
So to sum it up - the mouse is a representation inside the virtual environment of the computer, the keyboard is a physical representation in the real world. We're better interacting with real things because we can apply more of our senses to it and it's something we do naturally.
Better known as 318230.
Next on youtube!
I may be the only person who does... but I have used Trackpoint for years and find it to be a million times better than any touchpads. I hate mice and touchpads. I used tiling window manager that has extensive keyboard bindings which is great... but there are still things that require a pointer. Particularly browsing. The trackpoint lets you point and click without taking your fingers off the keyboard. Best of both worlds.
If you have a computer with trackpoint and touchpad... disable the touchpad for a week. It takes a day to get used to it. You will never go back.
(this is offended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
We all know that your efficiency is close to zero. The OP cold have glued his hand to the wall and be more productive than you are.
Yes they do, but they have flaws. For most workloads the mouse is less than ideal (e.g. typing intensive tasks). However if you are one of those Neanderthals whose workloads are primarily point and click on the picture of a banana (or whatever click bait you are interested in while pretending to do actual work) never fear. Nobody is going to take your mouse away, anytime soon, so you will not have to risk you dragging your knuckles across the keyboard.
I spend at least 60 hours a year waiting for Gmail to load. I'm getting close to that now for Google Drive too.
And it was AMAZING! I learned so much!
"In the Beginning Was the Command Line." Neal Stephenson.
Mouse/Keyboard combo FOR THE WIN.
I get the best tradeoff with Thinkpad-style keyboards (minus the horrible Tx40 series!). You get the mouse nub right there at your fingertips, so you barely have to move your hands to use the mouse. You can get an affordable plastic one for around $70, which is ok. But the real nice ones are the Tex Yoda or the Tex Kodachi. The Yoda II and the Kodachi have fully programmable keys, solid aluminum base, and if you buy the kit, you can choose your own mechanical keyswitches. I've got enough extra keys on my Kodachi that I've programmed a number of common tasks as macros and it's made a huge improvement in my productivity.
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You deserve a medal. Possibly a pizza too. Giving up the usage of a mouse is a momentous occasion that should be recognized worldwide for what it is. Idiocy at it's worst.
Kudos to you for your 'sacrifice.'
I roll with one of these three or so combos depending on the need: framebuffer-console + zsh + color prompt + DOS ANSI Codepage font. Rock BBSes via ssh and telnet and use elinks & mc & irssi like a boss flipping through 7-8 virtual consoles playin fbcon games when bored: no mouse other than 'gpm'. Next up we have: Fluxbox + X using my own custom themes & keyfile & menu i've developed over about 18 years via my CVS homedir usually on a BSD or another (doing that now, in fact). Last would be the ones I use only a couple of times a week: my maxed out Tezro running IRIX 6.5.30 with Indigo Magic User GUI (IRIX Interactive Desktop) with virtual desktops and occasionally an old MacOS 8.1 68k Quadra 700 or a souped up Amiga 3000 on OS 3.9. Not trashing your style, but those are the GUIs (and more primitive console environments) that I've found most useful. They almost all can easily be keyboard driven and I favor that style, but I ain't gonna use Photoshop in IRIX or MacOS without the mouse. Right tool for the job. Usually for my jobs that the keyboard and close to the metal as possible.
Another juicy morsel of worthless chum for the slashdot 'intelligentsia' to nosh on.
Based on the number of responses, there's a severe lack of available sex partners in the valley tonight.
If you really want to impress me, spend a week using only a mouse, no keyboard.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
...been navigating a Windows environment and the same couple dozen programs/files for almost 20 years with the keyboard, and I can't even watch someone using a mouse (even if they're good) flailing around on their computer without wincing. Here are a couple besides the built-in ones for those inclined:
1) Get a "Classic" Start menu, Xp style. Specifically, no search box. Whatever software you like is fine. Then clean the crap out of it until only the exact shortcut set you like is on there. Specifically, do what you can to make sure each item in the menu starts with a different letter/number. Then, by pressing the Start button, then the letter of the item, it automatically opens (not at the same time: Win, T, not Win+T if that makes sense). Two keystrokes, sight unseen, will open these things, and are insanely quick and easy to commit to muscle memory. Start, O for Outlook, Start, I for Intranet, Start, C for Chrome, for example. This gives you, around 30 items right off the bat. However, programs are generally under "Programs", so just use the same discipline under that directory. Start, P, V for Vivaldi, Start, P, N for Notepad++, etc. Build this structure according to your own most convenient mental map. Third-party Start menus are the best for this, since they tend to ignore Windows' attempts to futz with them. I like Classic Shell because Shift+Win opens the original Win10 menu where that search box is ready with focus for the once-a-month event that this tool actually is the right one for the job.
2) Map commonly used folders to a drive letter. You may need a batch file to fire on startup to maintain these, but, for example, I have a "Dump Bucket" folder on my desktop where I store temporary files, a Documents folder (not My Documents, because Windows has its grimy little paws in there) for main file storage, and a network folder that gets heavy use (Windows maintains this a little better than the local ones, so no need for that to be in the batch file). Then whenever you wind up with an Open or Save dialog box (Pro tip - press F12 instead of CTRL+S to save a new MS Office document, it will open the classic "Save As" dialog instead of that awful stock one where this won't work). The focus starts in the name box, but if you type your drive letter, you're automatically taken to wherever that destination is, with the focus still there. If it's a Save dialog, the box puts the filename back as it originally prompted, usually selected so Enter commits with the suggestion; typing automatically overwrites the suggestion. If it's an Open dialog, typing the first letter (of the file or directory) will pop that file in for an immediate open or navigation. Enter will commit.
3) That little menu button on the bottom of the keyboard (the equivalent of Shift+F10) is the same as a right click with a mouse. Moving focus (Tab and Shift+Tab) takes practice, but when navigating Windows Explorer (Win+E) and navigating to some file, Shortcut, Up Arrow, Enter, for example, will open the file properties. I almost cannot use a keyboard without that modifier (damn you Logitech for sacrificing this for your little Fn button). If your install of Windows has a ton of debris hanging on this context menu, it can be cleaned up in the Registry, but you're on your own there.
4) In a "normal" dialog box with several tabs across the top (and not some new GUI where they've abandoned these standards), CTRL+Tab will cycle you through them.
a way of trying to understand the way people used computers before the computer mouse became widely adopted for commercial machines in the 1980s.
Only user interfaces in those days were designed for keyboard based operation, trying to use only a keyboard today will be a significantly worse experience than it was because most modern applications assume the use of a mouse or touchscreen.
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Long, long ago, you could buy keyboard overlays for programs like Wordstar that had all the keyboard shortcuts labeled. I remember that because I'm old. *sigh* Good times, they were not.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
The most efficient interfaces I've ever made were character-based UI's that didn't depend on a mouse. Users grew really productive as I used their feedback to tune it and give them short-cuts for common needs.
However, it did take longer to learn on average than typical GUIs. Keyboard-centric interfaces (KCI) have more potential efficiency, but GUI's are just more intuitive and quicker to learn on average. GUI's trade away max long-term efficiency for a shorter learning curve.
Maybe if the industry settled on KCI standards, then one learns the convention set once and is ready to go for new applications that stick with the KCI convention. But the industry couldn't even stick with GUI standards, bastardizing the menus (M$ cough) and now mixing finger-centric (mobile) UI elements with classic GUI elements to make for a confusing mush.
The industry sure spends a lot of time re-inventing, de-inventing, and mis-inventing UI's to keep up with the UI Joneses, or Kardashians, giving us Kardashian "quality" as a result.
It may be possible to make a GUI that's both mouse-friendly and keyboard-friendly at the same time, but I'm skeptical both can be optimized. The way one goes about designing each to maximize screen real-estate and group items is generally different such that there's not a one-to-one correspondence. If you force a one-to-correspondence, you have to de-optimize at least one side.
Table-ized A.I.
Can it spell check for you?
This is how the blind use computers all the time. Just turn on VoiceOver (MacOS and iOS) or Narrator (Windows) and you too can live in the no mouse world. You will also see just how little attention web designers pay to accessibility issues.
I haunt a number of forums and found it a little tedious to have to ctrl+f whatever item I wanted to "click" on.
Firefox has a built-in feature to select links as you type on a page; no need to even press Ctrl+F first. On Chrome I have found the extension Type-ahead-find to closely replicate that feature.
Finding out how people used a computer in the past? Leave out the mouse and work in a terminal. Be it DOS or bash or whatever.
Yes, the mouse is overused often there are interfaces where it is absolutely faster to use a keyboard. Often menu's rell you what to use, vut where we used one program we use now many more.
The worst offender I see people doing is use the mouse to go to an entry field, enter what is needed and use the mouse to klick ok.
So as always, uae the right tool. Not everything is a nail.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I agree, and this is the reason I work on ThinkPads only.
We usually are pretty fine in native win/linux/osx environment but once there's a software that we're required to work with does not support any form of keyboard navigation (there are so many of them recently), life turns into hell because then we have to resort to OCR and creating custom hotspots with a sighted help on the application. So it's not fantastic but it's pretty good because keyboard is still the only way of interacting with computers with one group of disabled users.
Hmm, Im curious,
Why was this modded to -1? (like the effort was so fucking great, mind you)
Too much cock for coke or, dick for dope?
Which one, or what combo, is clouding your brain today, msmash?
Every Mac power user uses keyboard shortcuts excessively, that's why they always point out that having the same keyboard shortcuts for the same actions across apps and regardless of vendors is key and that's why Microsoft apps suck, because they mostly ignore that. Even when I design stuff, my left hand is usually on the keyboard all the time. Who closes windows with a mouse if you have command+W?
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
If you're writing a book, and are mostly typing into a word processor, switching between typing and mousing to select text and change formatting is what slows you down.
If you're writing a book, you're doing *a lot* of writing, with that much experience you're probably used to not let the keyboard go and use [SHIFT] + maybe [CTRL] + [arrow keys] for selection (maybe word selection), and the various [CTRL] + [B, I, U, etc.]
If you're a professional writer (e.g.: not merely a book but multiple books), you've probably even completely ditched Microsoft's piece of crap, and are using some professional software that dissociate content writing and typesetting and don't even care about formatting anymore, you're just signaling which parts are what (title, chapter, etc .) and letting the typesetting system do everything else for you.
(e.g.: If you happen to be a scientific writer, those tools are probably some derivative of LaTeX. Though some students are having fun using markdown instead).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
so exciting I slept with the box next to my bed.
Yes I was that pathetic in high school.
On the other hand, these sessions of "cobbling-together" computers have probably given you some problem solving and computing skills enabling you to have access to interesting hi-paying jobs, and the corresponding hi income is enabling you to have a much less pathetic life *NOW* than any of the guys you considered less pathetic back then.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
saka keys as a plugin for browsing with the keyboard. tmux (within alacritty) for terminals. Now I only have one terminal window open. Emacs for programming and authoring. And fvwm for keyboard jumping between windows. All without the mouse.
A decent window manager with vi(m) like keyboard control. Multiscreen / Multidesktop full screen apps.
everybody should try it, just for a few days.
you will increase your productivity for many tasks, others are just better done with a mouse.
the things is that everybody just assumes to use the mouse for everything without knowing there are faster ways to do things (by keyb).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
forget keyboard/mouse - automate your routine tasks away so you don't have to physically do them at all - Python, macros, etc - this no-mouse thing is just Word Perfect 4.1 from 1986 with its little template thing for the function keys - it's not using the POWER of the computer to do things for you
I'm personally using this Firefox extension to use a keyboard for web browsing.
https://github.com/binarez/BSPKeynav
That's your problem right there. Touchpads are fucking evil and cause more problems than they have ever solved. I will never understand why people love them so much and why so many companies insist on offering them as the only option for moving the cursor on a laptop. Trackpoints are vastly superior options that move only when you want them to and require far less movement to cross the screen (among other benefits).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If my hands are on the keyboard, I'll use the keyboard commands and arrow and page controls.If my hand is n the mouse I'll use the icons and the scrollwheel.
Input devices are just tools. Use whatever's appropriate.
If he wanted to understand how people used a computer before the commonality of mice then he needs to also do away with a GUI. In the time period he references computers were command line driven - text on a screen. There literally was no need for a pointer and an analog way to navigate as there is now. That said, I personally have relied on keyboard shortcuts for many things over the years as it's much quicker for more of the mundane tasks I perform each day. I come from the 80's period from which the author references so maybe that just kind of made more sense to me as I've progressed through the years to the present as a computer programmer. From the perspective of a young person that has never seen anything other than a graphical interface I do not know how intuitive keyboard shortcuts may seem.
Not one. Somebody refuses to learn from Dan Quayle's mistakes.
at a minimum.
Most of us power users already do this. Congratulations on discovering keyboard shortcuts, they've existed for decades. For precision work in precision apps, though, you'll need an input device. I can tell that the author is not doing that type of work, and is obviously a millennial. There is a whole world outside of that bubble you live in, author.
"A keyboard ... how quaint."
So much shit can be done way faster without the mouse. I mean, don't get me wrong, mice are good for some things... but most things are still better to be done via keyboard.
I switched from a mouse to a cat. Still hard to train, tho.
BTW, my phone doesn't use a mouse. My pointing device is a stick with a rubbery end on it.
Seriously?
I remember having to install massive amounts of bus cards on 286's so that workers could have this miracle of a device.
Knowing your shortcuts is very useful indeed, but as someone else said the mouse made things faster and easier than
remembering everything I've been trying to forget (like early shortcuts for WP, 123 and Word).
I guess at fifty five it's time...oh the hell with that, can't wait for Cyberpunk 2077 with a new Mad Catz mouse.
is this written by a 16 year old? That was my first thought. Maybe this person will stop driving everywhere and discover the joys of walking next.
I hate touchscreen interfaces.
Loved the old school mouse and keyboard. Was the best in its day.
Nowadays I prefer a direct neural interface. Much faster and more intuitive.
When you begin something new, it takes time to learn the skills.
Having a "cheat sheet" has been common for students in engineering studies for hundreds of years.
The same applies to any skill as you learn it. Eventually, usually after a few days, most of the things you use consistently are known, memorized, and become muscle memory. There aren't many things using a mouse that get the same muscle memory - click, double-click and clicking on the X to close a window are about it. Whereas you could trivially pick up 30 accel keys and -F4 to close the window in a day. Each of those saves time. Over a week, month, years, the added efficiencies are clear.
There are tasks which need a pointing device, but for most office workers, that isn't true.
Same for programmers in their editors. Spend 10 minutes watching 6 different programmes who are experts. You'll see different styles of working. If you include an expert a vim, you'll never look at vim the same again. I'd guess it is 80% more efficient for writing code than other editors. It really is amazing how much faster it is.
But I suppose someone who confuses 60 hrs a week with 60 hrs a yr would miss those efficiencies for lack of attention to detail.
Make an app that tells your user what the keyboard shortcut is where their mouse is hovering over. Icing on the cake: detects common clicks and tells your user what they can hit on their keyboard instead.
I'm all for knowing all the key commands and being able to turbo-navigate around without lifting your hands, but being a purist in anything is stupid. Be a pragmatist. Some things are just easier with a mouse/trackpad/pen/finger/whatever. While I do spend most of my day using tons of key commands, simple things like selecting multiple arbitrary list items, or file selection based on screen location (drag a box), or contextual menus, or lets not forget our friends working with visualizations - scaling/panning/rotating. I'm sure people can come up with a 100 more, and I'm sure there are some grizzly neckbeards that can argue they haven't ever used a mouse because it isn't needed in VIM/EMACS, but my point stands - use all the tools available to you where they are most effective!
Anyone else go lefty on mouse/keyboard? It's a little hard at first, then amazingly easy, even on copy/paste. I recommend everybody try this. At least it will alleviate too much strain on one wrist and exercise your brain a little. At best you'll be prepared if you ever have problems with one arm/hand/wrist.
#1 complaint: CTRL-F in Outlook creates a new email instead of invoking find/search. Inexcusable. Changing the bound keystrokes sucks if you switch among multiple machines and/or have yours replaced frequently and/or "updates" don't respect your customizations. Should every application adopt WordStar conventions? Maybe not, but there definitely needs to be less NIH syndrome. And applications that just ignore people who don't want to spend their lives mousing need to be relegated to the trash heap of poor design, along with their creators.
Carpal tunnel and RSI. Because that's what the increased magnitude of clicking is going to give him.
These slashdot ads literally take up 40% of my screen, its 'hard to read and scroll.
Is there a keyboard shortcut to close it so i can actually read or should i just stop coming here altogether.
10 years and im ready to throw in the towel because of those absurdly sized ads. scrolling is too frustrating and its too hard to read.
bye slashdot.
*yawn* I do this every day out of necessity. As a support provider, it's easier to use the keyboard than to constantly adjust to everybody's different mouse settings. I started in the days of Windows 3.1 when people rearranged the content of their program groups and, rather than constantly ask "where did you move X to?" when I couldn't find X where I expected it to be, I learned the keyboard shortcuts and exe names and did it all at the keyboard.
> ... one shortcut evangelist suggests that switching to keyboard shortcuts in Gmail saved him as much as 60 hours per year.
60 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds is 216000 seconds
at 10 seconds saved per email, that;s 21600 emails
or 59 emails a day.
TOO MANY emails per day, unsubscribe, get off the mailing lists
Is this the latest article from Kashmir Hill? At the rate she's going, she'll be writing articles on a typewriter next month.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Obviously this man does not type for a living. Taking my hands off the keyboard is a bad thing and slows me down; this happens a lot less when I use a mouse. Also the mouse allows the most precision for selecting text in my experience.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I use vigor instead!
Yes, there's a role for GVIM.
I got called out for this on the Vim forums, saying: You're such a wimp using GVIM! Just use a terminal like a real man! They challenged me to name a single case where a real geek would need to use a GUI for VIM instead of doing on the terminal.
So I told them my use case.
Then they shut up.
The use case is: sometimes I switch from the Latin alphabet to Chinese. I need to change the font and the font size. At the usual font size for Latin characters, the Chinese characters are not clearly legible. If I increase the font size so that they are legible (in fact, my own preference is to increase it to where they look calligraphically beautiful), the Latin letters are far bigger than they need to be, and you can't squeeze enough information into a screenful -- which is not a problem with Chinese text since each character contains so much more information.
So I have a quick keystroke mapping to switch to a given font with ":let &guifont = g:guifont_chin" etc., and we're happy. Not sure there's a way to change the terminal font from within Vim, and even if there were, that's not the role of Vim to control the terminal font, anyway.
And I don't use a mouse.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Trackball?
Computers didn't have a mouse when I started life - yes they existed but weren't standard issue. So I learned to navigate Windows without a mouse. A buddy of mine worked at MS "a long long time ago" and explained the shape of the icons (the Menu, Maximize and Minimize icons), the shape was explicit to have people remember "space bar was _" (the Menu _ is gone now - but pressing Alt _ still opens the menu). Neat historic folkloric right?
Then the Mouse came along. And I haven't looked back. It's like when they added brakes to cars and we no longer needed to drag our feet on the ground. You should try that too and stop writing silly articles.
No longer do you have to decide, when surfing, what to do with your right hand!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The mouse never was about end game speed increases. It was about an intuitive, object-oriented HMI design where screen elements were things to consider that you grabbed and did things with.
In this way, you didn't have to plow through manuals and write down shortcuts, and spend weeks just learning this.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"I used punch cards to navigate the Internet and it was amazing" OK - now showing my age.....
... and probably an old geezer by some standards, but digital hipsterism really pisses me off. You're not even close to replicating the way people used computers back in the olden days just by ditching the mouse. The fact that you're using a *personal* computer with a *color* monitor running *several* applications simultaneously and accessing them via a *graphical user interface* means you're still smack dab in the era where software was designed with a mouse in mind. Modern developers include shortcuts for those who prefer to use the keyboard, not because there's a likelihood that there isn't some form of pointing device present. You're hindering yourself in ways the developers didn't envision and then acting like it's some sort of grand achievement to send an email. Ditch all of those other modern conveniences in addition to the mouse, then report back on how much better your life is.
If you really want to see what it was like using a computer in the 1980's install linux without a gui, web browser, or any way of accessing the internet. Or better yet get a copy of dos 6, and perhaps windows 3.1, although i'm not sure that was the 80's. I think you'll find it's not quite as attractive as you think it is.
Your subject says "it WAS amazing", but the article says "over the next five days". So did it already happen or it's going to happen?
This is slashdot. Fuckin pussy retard using a gui with a keyboard. wtf.
cli ftw
[jk!]
Next level of enlightenment: discovers the command console.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Man you got me excited as fuck. Googled me a Yoda and Kodachi keyboard and for the lack of a better term: those keyboards are bullshit!
The Kodachi is the bottom half of a thinkpad without the rest of the thinkpad. It's laptop narrow, no number pad, and I have no idea where it is your claimed "extra keys" are supposed to go. It has no extra holes. It's one of those 80-something key mini-boards that fit in a server rack drawer. LAME.
The Yoda 2 was even LAMER. The cheap fucks went narrow again but in the wrong direction- you get 5 rows of keys and not a row more. Absolutely no keys to the right of . No F-Key row. Every key that isn't within the keys present on a 50's typewriter is doubled up onto your letter keys requiring a key to use. Again they made it like it was going in a 12" laptop or a server rack drawer.
Well great, you get Cherry clicky switches. Big whoop. This stock HP multimedia kb that work bought for $10 is more useful. I have a desk at home and work. It's HUGE. I don't need laptop size. I want a 200+button one if available. For now I guess I'll stick with my Logitech G19 with about 140 keys.
Thanks for the info. I mean no offense to you. You're just the messenger. I've been wanting a great trackpoint kb for ages but they just aren't around, I guess. I hope you enjoy yours though.
Slashdot is shit. I didn't select HTML editing but, fuck me, I don't get the less than greater than symbols. Missing words inserted and bolded below:
The Yoda 2 was even LAMER. The cheap fucks went narrow again but in the wrong direction- you get 5 rows of keys and not a row more. Absolutely no keys to the right of ENTER . No F-Key row. Every key that isn't within the keys present on a 50's typewriter is doubled up onto your letter keys requiring a Fn key to use. Again they made it like it was going in a 12" laptop or a server rack drawer.
DUH !
Yes, a LAPTOP KEYPAD is NOT AS FUNCTIONAL AS A KYBD/MOUSE setup ! ! !
vim is weirdly different to the original vi. Original vi is still the base line for those of us who remember it.
Perhaps you haven't used the original. It is probably available these days only in simulators running old Unix variants.
nvi is close to the original vi in most aspects. It is interesting to read the source code because cases where it does not reproduce old vi bugs are marked with special comments.