5 ms·
Arrow keys are slower than letters, since you have to move your hand.
by brucephillips 9y ago
Arrow keys are slower than letters, since you have to move your hand.
- inetknght 9y agoNot all keyboards are laid out the same.
- brucephillips 9y agoThere's no value in nitpicking. 99% of keyboards are standard qwerty.
- SmirkingRevenge 9y agoAnd 100% of those keyboards can have simple keys remapped
- brucephillips 9y agoWhat does that have to do with anything? The claim is that arrow keys are more intuitive keybindings. If you're remapping keys, then the familiarity of keys is irrelevant.
- tueo23094 9y agoi don't have to move my hand any further than i would to press ctrl/alt
- brucephillips 9y agoYes, you would. Ctrl/alt are within finger range. The arrow keys aren't.
- c256 9y agoThere’s a lot of research in this area. One of the most consistent results of this research is “people don’t feel like moving their hands (off the home row, over to the arrow keys, over to the editing keys, etc) is slower, even though it is slower”. For most people, the feel is more important than the speed. In other words, this argument topic usually doesn’t end reasonably for either side. :-) P.S. For extra fun, look up the mouse-vs.-hotkeys discussion. My favorite example is in the research paper for Plan 9’s Acme & 8½ ui.
- inetknght 9y agoAgain, different keyboards, even QWERTY keyboards, have different layouts. Look at laptops... no single brand has the same keyboard layout for each year's model. It's really f!@#$ing annoying actually.
- brucephillips 9y agoFor example?
- inetknght 9y agoGo to any computer store and look at keyboards.
- Too 9y agoAlt+B is not exactly home row friendly (should i use my thumb or ring finger for alt?), and especially switching quickly between Alt+B, Ctrl+F and Alt+F (pinky on ctrl, ring/thumb on alt, long on F and index on B??!) which is one of the most common navigation you do when you want to correct the misspelling of 6 words left and 3 characters forward, then 1 character left again because you accidentally moved 4 characters right instead of 3. Ctrl+Left and then right/left arrow is much easier, more intuitive and works everywhere else, not just linux terminal. Adding shift for selecting while navigating is also super easy. Left/right arrows also have the benefit of being close to up/down arrows which are very useful in multi line inputs.