'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.

Comments

not so much

[markdavis]

>"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/

Writing a book

[DrYak]

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).