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What kind of code are you writing that requires or benefits from a mouse? For selecting code I can imagine it helps. A touchscreen is just as good. But for writ

What kind of code are you writing that requires or benefits from a mouse? For selecting code I can imagine it helps. A touchscreen is just as good. But for writing it? I haven't used a mouse to drive coding since a C++ course in high school almost 20 years ago. The only thing I use it for is selecting and copying code. For navigating and writing code it's all emacs, tmux, terminals and unix tools.

kaybe 7y ago
Labview code is something you usually don't write. It's common enough in research when working with hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW addendum: It also allows you to create visual spaghetti code with the data pipes, which is much closer to real spaghetti than the text-based version.
gdxhyrd 7y ago
> A touchscreen is just as good. A touchscreen is a nightmare for manipulating small text. > For navigating and writing code it's all emacs, tmux, terminals and unix tools. Well, if you never leave emacs/vim and related workflows, you never know anything else. For writing code, yes, keyboard is best. For navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it. A particular example that stands out in the Linux world is GDB's CLI interface. It sucks. Its TUI is better, but still bad compared to a good GUI.
- gpderetta 7y ago
  > navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it. as an emacs user, I find it extremely painful watching my colleagues clicking around in eclipse to navigate the code base[1]. It feels just so inefficient and slow. [1] I assume eclipse actually has keyboard shortcuts, but they do not seem to be used by my eclipse-using colleagues.
  - gdxhyrd 7y ago
    Slow? It is definitely faster to use a mouse to click a word in a text than use the keyboard to get to it. (I have no idea about how Eclipse does it, though). Otherwise we would be playing RTS games with the keyboard. (I am a competitive RTS player, so I can almost instantly hit any point in the screen, which helps; a good mouse also helps a lot).
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > For navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it. Pure TUI is not optimal, but it still beats available mouse-based interface. At the very least, moving around the code is much faster with incremental search than with scrolling and spotting. I'm still waiting for a code reading program that supports drawing on top of the code and that would otherwise behave like an infinite desk with (searchable, linkable, annotateable) code printouts on it.
  - gdxhyrd 7y ago
    > At the very least, moving around the code is much faster with incremental search than with scrolling and spotting. A GUI does not necessarily imply scrolling to find something.
username90 7y ago
I use it all the time to cut, paste, copy, find and replace selection, indent or dedent specific lines. I can get by just fine using for example vim, but I am much faster with a mouse based interface since mouse based selection is much faster and more flexible. Sure keyboards have some shortcuts for specific kinds of selections, but with a mouse I can select exactly what I want in a fraction of a second. The only real advantage to a keyboard only interface is the ability to automate steps, but I feel if you feel a need to automate your code writing then it would be better to refactor the code to require less boilerplate.

kaybe 7y ago

Labview code is something you usually don't write. It's common enough in research when working with hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW addendum: It also allows you to create visual spaghetti code with the data pipes, which is much closer to real spaghetti than the text-based version.

gdxhyrd 7y ago

> A touchscreen is just as good. A touchscreen is a nightmare for manipulating small text. > For navigating and writing code it's all emacs, tmux, terminals and unix tools. Well, if you never leave emacs/vim and related workflows, you never know anything else. For writing code, yes, keyboard is best. For navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it. A particular example that stands out in the Linux world is GDB's CLI interface. It sucks. Its TUI is better, but still bad compared to a good GUI.

gpderetta 7y ago
> navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it. as an emacs user, I find it extremely painful watching my colleagues clicking around in eclipse to navigate the code base[1]. It feels just so inefficient and slow. [1] I assume eclipse actually has keyboard shortcuts, but they do not seem to be used by my eclipse-using colleagues.
- gdxhyrd 7y ago
  Slow? It is definitely faster to use a mouse to click a word in a text than use the keyboard to get to it. (I have no idea about how Eclipse does it, though). Otherwise we would be playing RTS games with the keyboard. (I am a competitive RTS player, so I can almost instantly hit any point in the screen, which helps; a good mouse also helps a lot).
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> For navigating, debugging and other things a TUI does not cut it. And I spend a lot more time reading and thinking about code than actually writing it. Pure TUI is not optimal, but it still beats available mouse-based interface. At the very least, moving around the code is much faster with incremental search than with scrolling and spotting. I'm still waiting for a code reading program that supports drawing on top of the code and that would otherwise behave like an infinite desk with (searchable, linkable, annotateable) code printouts on it.
- gdxhyrd 7y ago
  > At the very least, moving around the code is much faster with incremental search than with scrolling and spotting. A GUI does not necessarily imply scrolling to find something.

username90 7y ago

I use it all the time to cut, paste, copy, find and replace selection, indent or dedent specific lines. I can get by just fine using for example vim, but I am much faster with a mouse based interface since mouse based selection is much faster and more flexible. Sure keyboards have some shortcuts for specific kinds of selections, but with a mouse I can select exactly what I want in a fraction of a second. The only real advantage to a keyboard only interface is the ability to automate steps, but I feel if you feel a need to automate your code writing then it would be better to refactor the code to require less boilerplate.