4 ms·

As close as you like. Mouse movements are much more finicky than keyboard ones -- they require a physical precision (seeking, alignment, selection) that keyboa

by jonahx 9y ago

As close as you like. Mouse movements are much more finicky than keyboard ones -- they require a physical precision (seeking, alignment, selection) that keyboard movements don't. And if you never leave the keyboard, you don't have to return to the keyboard to continue your typing. I'm confident even a moderately skilled touch typist familiar with vim would outperform someone switching to the mouse on average for these kinds of tasks.

geofft 9y ago
I would be very interested to a) see this claim tested b) see if it makes a difference in productivity. (Most of what makes me slow at work is trying to understand technical problems, not trying to find parts of text in my editor.)
- criddell 9y ago
  > Most of what makes me slow at work is trying to understand technical problems That's me too. I spend a lot of time each day reading and that's a lot of scrolling with my mouse and ctrl-clicking on works to jump to definitions or declarations. Text editing speed is definitely not a bottleneck for me.
- jonahx 9y ago
  > I would be very interested to a) see this claim tested I would too. But I'd be willing to wager on the results beforehand. > b) see if it makes a difference in productivity. (Most of what makes me slow at work is trying to understand technical problems, not trying to find parts of text in my editor.) There's no doubt that things like understanding technical problems, avoiding procrastination, and many non-technical factors are the high-order bits of productivity. That said, the context of this conversation is text-editor optimization. Also, I think the true benefit of an optimized text editor isn't in raw time savings but in increased flow and just the joy of having a tool that feels like the extension of your mind, rather than something your mind works around.
  - criddell 9y ago
    > Also, I think the true benefit of an optimized text editor isn't in raw time savings but in increased flow and just the joy of having a tool that feels like the extension of your mind, rather than something your mind works around. I couldn't agree more. For me, that's working with a Logitech Anywhere MX mouse in Sublime Text. I imagine how I want the text on screen to be transformed and it just happens without conscious thought.
    - zastavka 9y ago
      Anything special about that particular mouse that makes it good for editing with ST?
      - criddell 9y ago
        No. It's just the mouse I've been using for a long time now. It's small, I'm used to how it tracks and accelerates, it fits my hand, and you can disengage the click mechanism on the scroll wheel to spin it freely. My big complaint is that the buttons eventually start to fail. Single clicks will sometimes register as double clicks and click-drag operations start to drop early.
  - btschaegg 9y ago
    > Also, I think the true benefit of an optimized text editor isn't in raw time savings but in increased flow and just the joy of having a tool that feels like the extension of your mind, rather than something your mind works around. My thoughts exactly (although mine might not have been worded that well :) ). Vim-bindings are like a REPL, but on a different level. If you compare a REPL to a loop of "save, compile, run, enter passwords, wait for a specific event to trigger", you might get a grasp of what a Vim-enthusiast gets out of the editor. They've fixed the thing to fix and moved on while you're still trying to find out where your mouse movement went. That might sound a bit exaggerated, but for the skeptics, I propose an experiment: Switch your keyboard to a different language (say Turkish, if you're very brave) and try to code for a couple of minutes. I do that regularly (my colleagues don't use the same layout as me), and I'd wager it's about the same level of annoyance as not being able to use Vim-bindings if you're used to them. I'm not saying that there aren't other effective ways of editing text, I'm merely finding that the defaults aren't very good.
- shadowfiend 9y ago
  While not a direct test, there's prior research into the fact that folks who use keyboard shortcuts think they're faster than their mousing counterparts---and are wrong: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html > 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. (PS and caveat emptor: it's now 30 years since that study was done. Also, I personally firmly enjoy my vim. I just try to stick to liking it because I like it, not because it makes me an uberuser. An uberuser will probably be an uberuser no matter what.)
  - e12e 9y ago
    I still think this might hold true. But for me mouse (and touchpads, trackpoints) trigger repetitive stress syndrome - so acme isn't really an alternative - yet. But I have some hope for merging the ideas of acme with proper touch screens/digitizers.
  - vthriller 9y ago
    Ugh, I don't know, a lot of things could skew that result, from font/button sizes (it's hard to miss if you could only fit 5 lines of text on your screen) to insane shortcuts to memorize (I mean c'mon, ⌘-⇧-4 to take a screenshot? There's a line or two about that at the link, but it's presented like inferior and ambiguous combinations are the only one that UI/UX folks can come up with) to ergonomics of the input devices themselves (some cannot stand chiclet keyboards, some can be really productive with trackpoints—sure, this doesn't sound anything like pre-1989 Apple but you get the idea) to even cursor speed/acceleration curve settings. That being said, I'd like to see some details on that R&D.
  - tincholio 9y ago
    Also, the poor experimental design and lack of peer review about casts some doubt, really.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  It depends on how much you do the activity. When I was a DBA, I did all sorts of data normalization stuff, and the Unix pipeline of tools (vim, sed, awk, some perl) was necessary and I was adept at it. Today, I don't do it that often, and it's quicker to just use Excel or whatever for slicing and dicing. It's not worth the overhead to save 10 minutes of manual tasking. You'd see this when you did green screen to web transformations in enterprise projects. Training would 1/10 the effort, and knowledge based processes would be faster, but the new people would be alot slower than the veteran keyboard operators.
chucky_z 9y ago
Have you tried a trackball mouse? That was the magic 'ah-ha' moment for me. I haven't used a normal mouse (at work) in probably 6 years or so. I find in speed it is trackball + kb > kb-only > normal mouse + kb.

by jonahx 9y ago

geofft 9y ago

I would be very interested to a) see this claim tested b) see if it makes a difference in productivity. (Most of what makes me slow at work is trying to understand technical problems, not trying to find parts of text in my editor.)

criddell 9y ago
> Most of what makes me slow at work is trying to understand technical problems That's me too. I spend a lot of time each day reading and that's a lot of scrolling with my mouse and ctrl-clicking on works to jump to definitions or declarations. Text editing speed is definitely not a bottleneck for me.
jonahx 9y ago
> I would be very interested to a) see this claim tested I would too. But I'd be willing to wager on the results beforehand. > b) see if it makes a difference in productivity. (Most of what makes me slow at work is trying to understand technical problems, not trying to find parts of text in my editor.) There's no doubt that things like understanding technical problems, avoiding procrastination, and many non-technical factors are the high-order bits of productivity. That said, the context of this conversation is text-editor optimization. Also, I think the true benefit of an optimized text editor isn't in raw time savings but in increased flow and just the joy of having a tool that feels like the extension of your mind, rather than something your mind works around.
- criddell 9y ago
  > Also, I think the true benefit of an optimized text editor isn't in raw time savings but in increased flow and just the joy of having a tool that feels like the extension of your mind, rather than something your mind works around. I couldn't agree more. For me, that's working with a Logitech Anywhere MX mouse in Sublime Text. I imagine how I want the text on screen to be transformed and it just happens without conscious thought.
  - zastavka 9y ago
    Anything special about that particular mouse that makes it good for editing with ST?
    - criddell 9y ago
      No. It's just the mouse I've been using for a long time now. It's small, I'm used to how it tracks and accelerates, it fits my hand, and you can disengage the click mechanism on the scroll wheel to spin it freely. My big complaint is that the buttons eventually start to fail. Single clicks will sometimes register as double clicks and click-drag operations start to drop early.
- btschaegg 9y ago
  > Also, I think the true benefit of an optimized text editor isn't in raw time savings but in increased flow and just the joy of having a tool that feels like the extension of your mind, rather than something your mind works around. My thoughts exactly (although mine might not have been worded that well :) ). Vim-bindings are like a REPL, but on a different level. If you compare a REPL to a loop of "save, compile, run, enter passwords, wait for a specific event to trigger", you might get a grasp of what a Vim-enthusiast gets out of the editor. They've fixed the thing to fix and moved on while you're still trying to find out where your mouse movement went. That might sound a bit exaggerated, but for the skeptics, I propose an experiment: Switch your keyboard to a different language (say Turkish, if you're very brave) and try to code for a couple of minutes. I do that regularly (my colleagues don't use the same layout as me), and I'd wager it's about the same level of annoyance as not being able to use Vim-bindings if you're used to them. I'm not saying that there aren't other effective ways of editing text, I'm merely finding that the defaults aren't very good.
shadowfiend 9y ago
While not a direct test, there's prior research into the fact that folks who use keyboard shortcuts think they're faster than their mousing counterparts---and are wrong: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html > 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. (PS and caveat emptor: it's now 30 years since that study was done. Also, I personally firmly enjoy my vim. I just try to stick to liking it because I like it, not because it makes me an uberuser. An uberuser will probably be an uberuser no matter what.)
- e12e 9y ago
  I still think this might hold true. But for me mouse (and touchpads, trackpoints) trigger repetitive stress syndrome - so acme isn't really an alternative - yet. But I have some hope for merging the ideas of acme with proper touch screens/digitizers.
- vthriller 9y ago
  Ugh, I don't know, a lot of things could skew that result, from font/button sizes (it's hard to miss if you could only fit 5 lines of text on your screen) to insane shortcuts to memorize (I mean c'mon, ⌘-⇧-4 to take a screenshot? There's a line or two about that at the link, but it's presented like inferior and ambiguous combinations are the only one that UI/UX folks can come up with) to ergonomics of the input devices themselves (some cannot stand chiclet keyboards, some can be really productive with trackpoints—sure, this doesn't sound anything like pre-1989 Apple but you get the idea) to even cursor speed/acceleration curve settings. That being said, I'd like to see some details on that R&D.
- tincholio 9y ago
  Also, the poor experimental design and lack of peer review about casts some doubt, really.
Spooky23 9y ago
It depends on how much you do the activity. When I was a DBA, I did all sorts of data normalization stuff, and the Unix pipeline of tools (vim, sed, awk, some perl) was necessary and I was adept at it. Today, I don't do it that often, and it's quicker to just use Excel or whatever for slicing and dicing. It's not worth the overhead to save 10 minutes of manual tasking. You'd see this when you did green screen to web transformations in enterprise projects. Training would 1/10 the effort, and knowledge based processes would be faster, but the new people would be alot slower than the veteran keyboard operators.

chucky_z 9y ago

Have you tried a trackball mouse? That was the magic 'ah-ha' moment for me. I haven't used a normal mouse (at work) in probably 6 years or so. I find in speed it is trackball + kb > kb-only > normal mouse + kb.