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I used to think the same until I used Plan 9 with its rio windowing system and Acme editor revolving heavily around mouse chording. I no longer hold prejudices

I used to think the same until I used Plan 9 with its rio windowing system and Acme editor revolving heavily around mouse chording. I no longer hold prejudices for preferring cursor movements over keyboard shortcuts, unless it's obviously more inefficient as opposed to more of a subjective grayness. In fact, it's quite tragic how the mouse is somehow seen as a "luser" tool, in favor of keyboard manipulation-driven interfaces being seen as more elite. No one writes mouse-driven interfaces for programmers anymore, which is a sad waste. By the way, none of this is basic computer skills. It's purely arbitrary UI convention and nothing more. Someone decided to bind certain key combinations to reflect a particular semantic action, but it is by no means fiat in the slightest. You're confused.

lqdc13 11y ago
I agree, and I think GUIs make people more productive. In windows land, people tend to use tools that have GUIs. So everyone uses their mouse.
- tluyben2 11y ago
  GUI interaction is more intuitive and thus easier to learn (children learning tablet use without previous instruction for instance) so yes everyone uses their mouse as they do not know better. Most experienced users use either a mix or only keyboard. For things like coding or writing books and papers (and many other uses; I believe it to be the case for most common uses of Photoshop as well); I dare you any day of tĥe week in a contest where you use only GUI without keyboard shortcuts and me on only keyboard for coding and see who is more productive. I think we can calculate from what mouse movements you need it is probably not physically possible for you to win that. Not that that says all as for the general population GUIs feel more productive compared to the effort you need to actually learn to beat that 'natural' productivity they got from nature.
  - lqdc13 11y ago
    http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html VVV quote from the link VVV We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: * Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
    - tluyben2 11y ago
      Like the commenters on that article say and like I said: I fully believe this goes for most computer users. I would like to see these stats for experienced coders during a day long coding session. The challenge stands anyway.
    - plonh 11y ago
      Tog also believed in research on your actual users, not cargo culting from decades old research in very different systems with very different users.
lloydde 11y ago
Three words: carpal tunnel syndrome.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Which also happens to typists, piano players, guitar players, .... It is a matter of posture and working without rest, not mouse vs keyboard. Speaking as someone that has a light version of it.
  - lloydde 11y ago
    Sure, but a disproportionate amount of repetitive strain injury relates to mouse use. Effective use of the keyboard is not about being elite, it is the easiest and most affordable way to minimize injury.
dkbrk 11y ago
I haven't used Plan 9, so I'll have to take you at your word that the mouse in an effective preferred method of input in its UI. I would be very interested if you had some specific examples of how it is used. That said, there are very real differences between methods of input that go far beyond "arbitrary UI convention" and that make one or the other substantially better suited for certain actions. For example, the mouse is excellent at quickly moving to an arbitrary small area on a screen. Take as an example the operation of jumping to a particular character in a text file. To do this in emacs, I first move vertically either by looking at the line number of my target and jumping to it, or by moving in blocks (e.g paragraphs or code blocks) then by lines. Then I move the cursor to the correct horizontal position, first by blocks (e.g words, lexemes), then by characters. If my hand were already on the mouse, I think in a substantial proportion of cases using the mouse would be faster. But there are other considerations. There is a noticable context switch moving my hand from my keyboard to my mouse and vice versa. Also, the mouse is only really good at moving to an area: moving to a single pixel is quite difficult; moving to a particular character is somewhat slower than moving to a word. This imprecision is related to the redundancies (i.e non-injectivity) in translating 2D analog movement to a 2D discrete position and mapping that to some action. In contrast, keyboard commands tend to be discrete, precise and minimal. While I could press the wrong key, that's a fairly substantial mistake; pressing a key off-centre or pressing it a bit harder than usual doesn't change the outcome of the command wheras a minute movement of my hand could easily make my mouse input skip over to something unintended. One application the mouse excels at is clicking hyperlinks, or something hyperlink-like. Generally, these areas of input are large enough that a little bit of imprecision is acceptable and the 2D input can be very efficient. This comes up in emacs, for example when navigating info pages. You can either cycle through the hyperlinks in a document with TAB and Shift-TAB, or you can use the mouse. While it's a trade-off, generally I find the mouse to be far more comfortable. The keyboard also offers an exponentially larger space of possible inputs for a given input length. The 2D input space of the mouse is quite large, but its imprecision considerably limits the space of useful inputs (i.e it would be a bad idea to assign a different command to each pixel of the screen). Like the keyboard, this can be expanded by successive commands, for example with a nested menu or compound actions such as click-and-drag. However, each element of the mouse input is slower -- wheras a keyboard command sequence can be entered as a whole from memory, each stage of the mouse input generally requires responding to new visual input (e.g a new submenu that has opened) and another distinct physical movement. There is something to be said for combining keyboard chords on one hand with the mouse in the other, this allows much of the flexibility of the keyboard commands, but is still only really useful when the input is well suited to the somewhat idiosyncratic properties of the 2D cursor. Finally, I think the most important factor for many people is the context-switch between touch-typing and keyboard-and-mouse. In this situation, even if the mouse is a better input method (e.g for clicking a hyperlink), then there may still be considerable advantages overall to just using the keyboard.
ino 11y ago
You won't believe the time you save by just binding 'esc' to a mouse button. 'enter' also, but to a lesser extent. Every time you're mousing and a dialog appears, you have escape and cancel. It's also very useful in photoshop and games. I learned it from working on AutoCAD with a puck on a tablet. One of the buttons was binded to 'esc', and the right button acts as an enter. Later when I switched to mouse, the 'esc' mouse button was the thing I missed the most. I've also made some statistics: http://inodetelic.com/autocad-command-statistics/ http://inodetelic.com/autocad-command-statistics/ Puck UIs (https://www.dropbox.com/s/7v099r086r0cyu1/some_tablet.jpeg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/7v099r086r0cyu1/some_tablet.jpeg?d...) were good at the time for drawing programs because screen space was precious.

lqdc13 11y ago

I agree, and I think GUIs make people more productive. In windows land, people tend to use tools that have GUIs. So everyone uses their mouse.

tluyben2 11y ago
GUI interaction is more intuitive and thus easier to learn (children learning tablet use without previous instruction for instance) so yes everyone uses their mouse as they do not know better. Most experienced users use either a mix or only keyboard. For things like coding or writing books and papers (and many other uses; I believe it to be the case for most common uses of Photoshop as well); I dare you any day of tĥe week in a contest where you use only GUI without keyboard shortcuts and me on only keyboard for coding and see who is more productive. I think we can calculate from what mouse movements you need it is probably not physically possible for you to win that. Not that that says all as for the general population GUIs feel more productive compared to the effort you need to actually learn to beat that 'natural' productivity they got from nature.
- lqdc13 11y ago
  http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html VVV quote from the link VVV We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: * Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    Like the commenters on that article say and like I said: I fully believe this goes for most computer users. I would like to see these stats for experienced coders during a day long coding session. The challenge stands anyway.
  - plonh 11y ago
    Tog also believed in research on your actual users, not cargo culting from decades old research in very different systems with very different users.

lloydde 11y ago

Three words: carpal tunnel syndrome.

pjmlp 11y ago
Which also happens to typists, piano players, guitar players, .... It is a matter of posture and working without rest, not mouse vs keyboard. Speaking as someone that has a light version of it.
- lloydde 11y ago
  Sure, but a disproportionate amount of repetitive strain injury relates to mouse use. Effective use of the keyboard is not about being elite, it is the easiest and most affordable way to minimize injury.

dkbrk 11y ago

I haven't used Plan 9, so I'll have to take you at your word that the mouse in an effective preferred method of input in its UI. I would be very interested if you had some specific examples of how it is used. That said, there are very real differences between methods of input that go far beyond "arbitrary UI convention" and that make one or the other substantially better suited for certain actions. For example, the mouse is excellent at quickly moving to an arbitrary small area on a screen. Take as an example the operation of jumping to a particular character in a text file. To do this in emacs, I first move vertically either by looking at the line number of my target and jumping to it, or by moving in blocks (e.g paragraphs or code blocks) then by lines. Then I move the cursor to the correct horizontal position, first by blocks (e.g words, lexemes), then by characters. If my hand were already on the mouse, I think in a substantial proportion of cases using the mouse would be faster. But there are other considerations. There is a noticable context switch moving my hand from my keyboard to my mouse and vice versa. Also, the mouse is only really good at moving to an area: moving to a single pixel is quite difficult; moving to a particular character is somewhat slower than moving to a word. This imprecision is related to the redundancies (i.e non-injectivity) in translating 2D analog movement to a 2D discrete position and mapping that to some action. In contrast, keyboard commands tend to be discrete, precise and minimal. While I could press the wrong key, that's a fairly substantial mistake; pressing a key off-centre or pressing it a bit harder than usual doesn't change the outcome of the command wheras a minute movement of my hand could easily make my mouse input skip over to something unintended. One application the mouse excels at is clicking hyperlinks, or something hyperlink-like. Generally, these areas of input are large enough that a little bit of imprecision is acceptable and the 2D input can be very efficient. This comes up in emacs, for example when navigating info pages. You can either cycle through the hyperlinks in a document with TAB and Shift-TAB, or you can use the mouse. While it's a trade-off, generally I find the mouse to be far more comfortable. The keyboard also offers an exponentially larger space of possible inputs for a given input length. The 2D input space of the mouse is quite large, but its imprecision considerably limits the space of useful inputs (i.e it would be a bad idea to assign a different command to each pixel of the screen). Like the keyboard, this can be expanded by successive commands, for example with a nested menu or compound actions such as click-and-drag. However, each element of the mouse input is slower -- wheras a keyboard command sequence can be entered as a whole from memory, each stage of the mouse input generally requires responding to new visual input (e.g a new submenu that has opened) and another distinct physical movement. There is something to be said for combining keyboard chords on one hand with the mouse in the other, this allows much of the flexibility of the keyboard commands, but is still only really useful when the input is well suited to the somewhat idiosyncratic properties of the 2D cursor. Finally, I think the most important factor for many people is the context-switch between touch-typing and keyboard-and-mouse. In this situation, even if the mouse is a better input method (e.g for clicking a hyperlink), then there may still be considerable advantages overall to just using the keyboard.

ino 11y ago

You won't believe the time you save by just binding 'esc' to a mouse button. 'enter' also, but to a lesser extent. Every time you're mousing and a dialog appears, you have escape and cancel. It's also very useful in photoshop and games. I learned it from working on AutoCAD with a puck on a tablet. One of the buttons was binded to 'esc', and the right button acts as an enter. Later when I switched to mouse, the 'esc' mouse button was the thing I missed the most. I've also made some statistics: http://inodetelic.com/autocad-command-statistics/ http://inodetelic.com/autocad-command-statistics/ Puck UIs (https://www.dropbox.com/s/7v099r086r0cyu1/some_tablet.jpeg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/7v099r086r0cyu1/some_tablet.jpeg?d...) were good at the time for drawing programs because screen space was precious.