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Surely you'd agree that a mouse as an interface can provide benefit even in the context of a text editor?
by mercer 9y ago
Surely you'd agree that a mouse as an interface can provide benefit even in the context of a text editor?
- ATsch 9y agoSure, but the question is if the physical and mental context-switch is worth this benefit. I'd say that in editors with a sufficiently expressive keyboard interface like vim, it is not. One thing I still find myself doing in vim is using the scroll wheel. Browsing and editing is a context switch anyway and I think scroll wheels express scrolling a lot better than keyboards ever can.
- mercer 9y agoFair enough. I would definitely err on the side of vim when it comes to the benefits of staying within vim's 'mental model', because I do agree the context-switch does matter. Furthermore, the fact that all my vim-context keypresses can be stored as a 'macro' in itself has provided enough of a productivity increase to make it all worth it. And this is even the case in less-than-perfect vim emulators. And I do agree that for some things, scrolling and perhaps 'exploring' in general being a big one, a mouse can be worth the context switch.
- shangxiao 9y agosiisussjsk might've been referring to doing a quick check to see if vim supports mouse as an interface… which it does.