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'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.
You became a VI user and ditched Emacs?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
Wrong. Some things are infinitely better with a mouse (the author of the article even says so). Some things are infinitely better with keyboard shortcuts. I'd venture to say that most things are BEST with a healthy combination of the two.
The author is like a guy who has used a hammer as his only tool for his whole life. Suddenly he discover a screwdriver and realizes screws go in so much easier and cleaner than with a hammer, and suddenly says "get the fuck out of here, Mr Hammer" and proceeds living life with a screwdriver as his only tool.
> The mouse is more intuitive for the person who is unskilled at the software they are using.
Bullshit.
You are ignoring Context.
Try playing a RTS (Real Time Strategy) or FPS (First Person Shooter) games without a mouse on a desktop computer. In an RTS using the keyboard to move your troops is slow and inefficient compared to a mouse. Likewise in an FPS while you can move your character with WASD aiming with the keyboard is LESS PRECISE. Turning an arbitrary numbers of degrees with a mouse is trivial.
A mouse allows for non-linear spatial manipulation such as aiming or panning.
Text editing is usually more of a linear process so a keyboard is usually far faster in that _context._
> It's astonishing how much software intended for repetitive data entry is not designed better around the keyboard.
That's true. Hotkeys and Shortcut keys have been deprecated for years by clueless designers.
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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