7 ms·

The mouse, when chosen as the primary user interface (for something other than a fundamentally-spatial task, like CAD) is a soul-destroyer. This is because op

The mouse, when chosen as the primary user interface (for something other than a fundamentally-spatial task, like CAD) is a soul-destroyer. This is because operating a mouse-based user interface is a conscious process - one which cannot be fully relegated to "muscle memory." Unlike the keyboard, the mouse scarcely rewards learning at all. Erik Naggum, in a Usenet post (circa 1997) explains this far better than I could: "The clumsiness of people who have to engage their brain at every step is unbearably painful to watch, at least to me, and that's what the novice-friendly software makes people do, because there's no elegance in them, it's just a mass of features to be learned by rote... it's sadly obvious that we are moving into a way of working that is predominantly _conscious_, for which I believe the human brain was never prepared. we no longer have the time to let skills sink into the autonomous nervous system, as it were, and even if we try, the criminal in Redmond, WA, has a new, incompatible version out by the time we learned the last version... One of the joys of learning to ride a bicycle is to stop thinking about it -- the feeling that I had successfully programmed my body to master a bicycle at least thrilled me as a kid (except I didn't know the verb "to program")... we need to communicate to users that learning to use Emacs is like learning to ride a bicycle -- it does take some time and effort, it's a worth-while skill to have, and then you never forget. I firmly believe that the novice-friendly software is like giving people several sets of supporting wheels so they won't tilt, but could get moving right away, and then never taking them off, preferring that they keep using them and moving so slowly that they always need them. of course, if you argue that they should remove the supporting wheels to such users, they will, admittedly correctly, argue that they will fall _splat_ on the ground and ruin their three-piece suits. clearly a no-go." (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab91864?dmode=source&output=gplain http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab918...)

EAMiller 15y ago
This is a great point - when I was trying to articulate (to myself) why I prefer the keyboard it wasn't necessarily any speed advantage, it was more like the "flow" advantage. Your point speaks to that. I think there's also a big difference in the amount of physical effort needed when using the mouse. With the keyboard it's easier to keep most of my arms relaxed, and when I need to switch to the mouse everything from the shoulder down has to contract into action.
- awj 15y ago
  Possibly you could stand to up the sensitivity? I can accomplish most of what I need from a mouse using simple wrist rotation. That said, I live in emacs and spend most of my day on the keyboard. Maybe I'm doing it wrong in a way that only works for limited mouse use.
scythe 15y ago
Typical point-and-click interaction is conscious, yes, but mouse gestures generally aren't, since you don't have to know where the cursor is in order to use them. This is why I like Opera so much.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  That's one of the reasons I used to like Opera. Now I like it because shift+arrowkeys basically mean that I never have to even touch a mouse to browse the internet. It's completely keyboard-accessible.
  - jemfinch 15y ago
    I use the Vimium extension in Chrome to gain that same keyboard navigability.
    - Timothee 15y ago
      To prove your point I upvoted and replied to your comment just by using the keyboard. I don't mind using the mouse so much as I do moving my hand from my keyboard to the mouse and back.
    - jokermatt999 15y ago
      Similarly, there's Pentadactyl and Vimperator for Firefox. It's also an incredibly powerful addon when you dig down into what you can do with it. Last I checked (which was quite a while ago, to be fair), Vimium sadly didn't have the more technical aspects, but it's pretty much equal for keyboard browsing.
roelbondoc 15y ago
I spend most of my computing hours using the keyboard 99% of the time. I can completely agree keyboard interfaces are very rewarding. However, I believe there is "muscle memory" that can be learned using the mouse. For example, playing a lot of first person shooter games in my day, one can learn and memorize the nuances of moving the mouse. Correlating the amount and direction of movement of the mouse with the response of the screen is, I believe, a skill that can be learned and is quite rewarding.
- bad_user 15y ago
  The way you move the mouse has less to do with how you interact with the interface - yes, you may be able to optimize mouse moves, but that's not enough. What happens is that a mouse-friendly interface is organized in such a way that finding the right action to click on involves traversing a tree of choices. Even if you memorize the exact location of the action you want in that tree, for many actions you still need several clicks to perform something instead of just one. And that's not the end of it - you clearly need keyboard input too, in many cases. For example in WYSIWYG editors, you type-type-type, then you need a new header, move your hand on the mouse, select the right header in the select-box (during which your eyes also move from the current line), then get back your hand in typing position and start typing again, until you need another mouse action. This is the reason I wrote my last resume in HTML and didn't even bother opening office, even though HTML sucks for typography (I'll probably switch to Latex next time). That said, the mouse is better for browsing around, exploring stuff or for interfaces such as Photoshop. I also don't mind the mouse for interfaces where I don't need to be productive. Someone mentioned CAD in this thread - I disagree as AutoCAD is more productive with keyboard input.
- rapind 15y ago
  Unrelated, but one of the things with FPS's and such that annoy me the most is that you are required to use the mouse to achieve top efficiency. It would be great if someone made a game or extended the options to allow for better keyboard navigation / aiming. Like key combinations to tweak the interval size for a directional key (speed). I.e. shift+w, alt+w, ctrl/cmmd + w, maybe vim-like w20, etc. Also for increasing turn intervals like 45, 90, 180, and custom degree immediate turns.
orangecat 15y ago
soul-destroyer That's a very good term. I've often seen it applied to commuting, for largely the same reasons.
- marknutter 15y ago
  It's also completely meaningless.
  - Wilduck 15y ago
    Really? I think it captures the feeling of having your feeling of purpose slowly sucked out of you fairly well.
  - SkyMarshal 15y ago
    Having experienced it with 6 months of a 5 hour commute in NYC (from Upper East to bumfuck Long Island and back), I can assure you it isn't.
Qz 15y ago
This is only true for mouse based interfaces that require hand-eye coordination (click this, drag it there) -- gesture based interfaces (click and drag left/up/etc) don't suffer from this problem at all.
jcfrei 15y ago
You can only build a muscle memory for keyboard commands, if there are uniform shortcuts across different programs. Which is the case with commands such as ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-w etc. However creating such uniform shortcuts won't fit the variety and complexity of today's applications - shortcuts are easy if you're dealing with trivial tasks like text editing in vim and emacs. However especially on the web (where many users probably spend most of their time) building an intuitive and usable interface for keyboards would be nearly impossible, given the variety of web applications.
- koenigdavidmj 15y ago
  Related anecdote: in Vim, ^W is the fairly useful 'delete previous word'. Pretty much everywhere else, it is 'destroy window'. This had led to many an issue.
  - Wilduck 15y ago
    Also related: In Emacs C-n is next line, which I would use to scroll through a small portion of the document. Most everywhere else it spawns a new window, so in Firefox I would want to scroll down 5 or 6 lines and end up with a bunch more windows open.
    - technomancy 15y ago
      This is why I've stopped using programs that don't have the decency to at least pretend to be Emacs.
  - SkyMarshal 15y ago
    Although, if you learn Vim, there are Vim extensions for just about every program you might use - Firefox, Chrome, Eclipse, etc. I love being able control many programs with Vim's or Vim-like keybindings.
- jokermatt999 15y ago
  Vim navigation (j/k, etc) seems to be fairly standard for "move through items in a list". It's in Gmail, DuckDuckGo, and some others I can't remember offhand. Are there any other examples I'm missing?
wvenable 15y ago
> one which cannot be fully relegated to "muscle memory." I find mouse clicking as much "muscle memory" as using the keyboard; changing the position of buttons and items causes issues. For example, when I upgraded to Firefox 4, accessing bookmarks was moved, and for a few days I didn't automatically bring up HN without thinking.
- ericmoritz 15y ago
  I find that I unconsciously make the cursor track my eyes. I don't know if this falls into the realm of muscle memory but it makes using the mouse a lot less effort because the I am usually looking at where I am about to click.
podperson 15y ago
An interesting perspective (even if, I think, hopelessly wrong-headed). Maybe that's why I hate Windows so much -- the position of the menu bar, for example, means I have to stop and think to pull menu items in a way that I never have to on the Mac (thanks to Fitt's law). Similarly, the over-reliance on toolbars and ribbons. > Unlike the keyboard, the mouse scarcely rewards learning at all I find it hilarious watching experienced vi and emacs folks furiously typing macros to perform text operations that are trivial with a mouse or graphical editor. The problem isn't that the mouse doesn't reward learning, but that what you learn is harder to define.
- Derbasti 15y ago
  There are Vim folks who know when to use the mouse, though...
- nightski 15y ago
  I use emacs. I don't really feel the need to defend it however. But honestly furiously typing is just not correct. Most of it is just muscle memory, not a lot of conscience thought. It takes a lot longer to switch to the mouse and click a position than to just use the built in commands. There is also the aspect that the only time my hands hurt, or I experience carpal tunnel symptoms is when using the mouse extensively (especially when gaming). I have never had pain when using the keyboard.
  - Shorel 15y ago
    "It takes a lot longer to switch to the mouse and click a position than to just use the built in commands." Sure. Never mind that mediocre Starcraft players like me can perform about 100 mouse actions per minute of the sort you just described. That argument really doesn't match reality anymore.
JonnieCache 15y ago
Fun fact: this is the real reason why vinyl is so loved by DJs. See also: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Flow_(psychol...
ChuckMcM 15y ago
I've found validation in this point of view in an unexpected source, World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW has the ability to redefine the user interface through keyboard short-cuts, LUA code, and UX changes. There is an active community providing different takes on the UX. WoW has a built in 'time test' which consists of 'boss' encounters in what the game calls a 'raid'. [1] In polling characters who were better able to perform during an encounter, there was a strong correlation between "keyboard" users and better performace. Better was defined as able to respond faster and more consistently to changing conditions. It would be interesting to have Tog have a look. [1] For anyone not familiar with WoW and its gameplay, a group of 10 or 25 people, of different specialties (game specific; damage doers, healers, and damage takers (tanks)) who coordinate during an encounter with a powerful game character (a boss) by fighting it. Healers are focussed on applying various skills to keep the players alive (they take damage due to various game mechanics), damage doers (dps) use different skills to maximize their damage, and tanks use their skills to keep the game characters focussed on attacking them rather than the other players. After a set amount of time, the game character 'enrages' which basically makes it impossible to kill and it does 10x the amount of damage it normally does. This results in a 'wipe' (all player characters in the group dying).
- jpenney 15y ago
  If you suggested to a Starcraft 2 pro that they should stop using the keyboard shortcuts because they are slower, you would be laughed out of the building. Erik Naggum was on the ball with that one - it is impossible to acquire muscle memory for mouse movements because there is no base position from which all movement actions are performed.
  - Steko 15y ago
    Wouldn't they also laugh you out of the building if you suggested they should stop using a mouse?
  - alanfalcon 15y ago
    I'm replying to the specific points about Starcraft 2 here, but really this is off topic considering that nobody is actually saying Professional Gamers in the year 2011 should be compared to word processor "power users" in the year 1989. Professional Starcraft 2 players need to use hotkeys because they have to be able to do multiple tasks at once - they're macroing with their left hand while clicking around the mini-map and performing other tasks with their mouse hand. You couldn't play SC2 (well) with just the keyboard or just the mouse. As for the muscle memory for mouse movements, there's no question that Pro SC2 players have exactly that. If you watch a pro give his opening workers commands, it looks like what he's doing should be impossible. You or I couldn't sit down at a computer and do it. But they can precisely because of muscle memory: they know how far a mineral node is from the starting base and exactly what mouse movements are needed to select a worker and send him to a specific mineral patch, then select the next and so on. It's true that in Starcraft 1 this muscle memory was even more necessary as SC2 has automated (to a high degree) many tasks that once required precisely practiced mouse movements, but you still see SC2 players using those skills that they learned from Brood War.
Shorel 15y ago
I believe I perform Opera mouse gestures using just muscle memory, I really don't have to think at all. Before mouse gestures, yes, I would have agreed with that text, but not now. I genuinely browse faster with just the mouse and the gestures than with only keyboard, or with mouse+keyboard without gestures. Note: the Chrome gestures plug-in is not up to the quality of the Opera native implementation. There's no comparison.

EAMiller 15y ago

This is a great point - when I was trying to articulate (to myself) why I prefer the keyboard it wasn't necessarily any speed advantage, it was more like the "flow" advantage. Your point speaks to that. I think there's also a big difference in the amount of physical effort needed when using the mouse. With the keyboard it's easier to keep most of my arms relaxed, and when I need to switch to the mouse everything from the shoulder down has to contract into action.

awj 15y ago
Possibly you could stand to up the sensitivity? I can accomplish most of what I need from a mouse using simple wrist rotation. That said, I live in emacs and spend most of my day on the keyboard. Maybe I'm doing it wrong in a way that only works for limited mouse use.

scythe 15y ago

Typical point-and-click interaction is conscious, yes, but mouse gestures generally aren't, since you don't have to know where the cursor is in order to use them. This is why I like Opera so much.

StavrosK 15y ago
That's one of the reasons I used to like Opera. Now I like it because shift+arrowkeys basically mean that I never have to even touch a mouse to browse the internet. It's completely keyboard-accessible.
- jemfinch 15y ago
  I use the Vimium extension in Chrome to gain that same keyboard navigability.
  - Timothee 15y ago
    To prove your point I upvoted and replied to your comment just by using the keyboard. I don't mind using the mouse so much as I do moving my hand from my keyboard to the mouse and back.
  - jokermatt999 15y ago
    Similarly, there's Pentadactyl and Vimperator for Firefox. It's also an incredibly powerful addon when you dig down into what you can do with it. Last I checked (which was quite a while ago, to be fair), Vimium sadly didn't have the more technical aspects, but it's pretty much equal for keyboard browsing.

roelbondoc 15y ago

I spend most of my computing hours using the keyboard 99% of the time. I can completely agree keyboard interfaces are very rewarding. However, I believe there is "muscle memory" that can be learned using the mouse. For example, playing a lot of first person shooter games in my day, one can learn and memorize the nuances of moving the mouse. Correlating the amount and direction of movement of the mouse with the response of the screen is, I believe, a skill that can be learned and is quite rewarding.

bad_user 15y ago
The way you move the mouse has less to do with how you interact with the interface - yes, you may be able to optimize mouse moves, but that's not enough. What happens is that a mouse-friendly interface is organized in such a way that finding the right action to click on involves traversing a tree of choices. Even if you memorize the exact location of the action you want in that tree, for many actions you still need several clicks to perform something instead of just one. And that's not the end of it - you clearly need keyboard input too, in many cases. For example in WYSIWYG editors, you type-type-type, then you need a new header, move your hand on the mouse, select the right header in the select-box (during which your eyes also move from the current line), then get back your hand in typing position and start typing again, until you need another mouse action. This is the reason I wrote my last resume in HTML and didn't even bother opening office, even though HTML sucks for typography (I'll probably switch to Latex next time). That said, the mouse is better for browsing around, exploring stuff or for interfaces such as Photoshop. I also don't mind the mouse for interfaces where I don't need to be productive. Someone mentioned CAD in this thread - I disagree as AutoCAD is more productive with keyboard input.
rapind 15y ago
Unrelated, but one of the things with FPS's and such that annoy me the most is that you are required to use the mouse to achieve top efficiency. It would be great if someone made a game or extended the options to allow for better keyboard navigation / aiming. Like key combinations to tweak the interval size for a directional key (speed). I.e. shift+w, alt+w, ctrl/cmmd + w, maybe vim-like w20, etc. Also for increasing turn intervals like 45, 90, 180, and custom degree immediate turns.

orangecat 15y ago

soul-destroyer That's a very good term. I've often seen it applied to commuting, for largely the same reasons.

marknutter 15y ago
It's also completely meaningless.
- Wilduck 15y ago
  Really? I think it captures the feeling of having your feeling of purpose slowly sucked out of you fairly well.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  Having experienced it with 6 months of a 5 hour commute in NYC (from Upper East to bumfuck Long Island and back), I can assure you it isn't.

Qz 15y ago

This is only true for mouse based interfaces that require hand-eye coordination (click this, drag it there) -- gesture based interfaces (click and drag left/up/etc) don't suffer from this problem at all.

jcfrei 15y ago

You can only build a muscle memory for keyboard commands, if there are uniform shortcuts across different programs. Which is the case with commands such as ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-w etc. However creating such uniform shortcuts won't fit the variety and complexity of today's applications - shortcuts are easy if you're dealing with trivial tasks like text editing in vim and emacs. However especially on the web (where many users probably spend most of their time) building an intuitive and usable interface for keyboards would be nearly impossible, given the variety of web applications.

koenigdavidmj 15y ago
Related anecdote: in Vim, ^W is the fairly useful 'delete previous word'. Pretty much everywhere else, it is 'destroy window'. This had led to many an issue.
- Wilduck 15y ago
  Also related: In Emacs C-n is next line, which I would use to scroll through a small portion of the document. Most everywhere else it spawns a new window, so in Firefox I would want to scroll down 5 or 6 lines and end up with a bunch more windows open.
  - technomancy 15y ago
    This is why I've stopped using programs that don't have the decency to at least pretend to be Emacs.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  Although, if you learn Vim, there are Vim extensions for just about every program you might use - Firefox, Chrome, Eclipse, etc. I love being able control many programs with Vim's or Vim-like keybindings.
jokermatt999 15y ago
Vim navigation (j/k, etc) seems to be fairly standard for "move through items in a list". It's in Gmail, DuckDuckGo, and some others I can't remember offhand. Are there any other examples I'm missing?

wvenable 15y ago

> one which cannot be fully relegated to "muscle memory." I find mouse clicking as much "muscle memory" as using the keyboard; changing the position of buttons and items causes issues. For example, when I upgraded to Firefox 4, accessing bookmarks was moved, and for a few days I didn't automatically bring up HN without thinking.

ericmoritz 15y ago
I find that I unconsciously make the cursor track my eyes. I don't know if this falls into the realm of muscle memory but it makes using the mouse a lot less effort because the I am usually looking at where I am about to click.

podperson 15y ago

An interesting perspective (even if, I think, hopelessly wrong-headed). Maybe that's why I hate Windows so much -- the position of the menu bar, for example, means I have to stop and think to pull menu items in a way that I never have to on the Mac (thanks to Fitt's law). Similarly, the over-reliance on toolbars and ribbons. > Unlike the keyboard, the mouse scarcely rewards learning at all I find it hilarious watching experienced vi and emacs folks furiously typing macros to perform text operations that are trivial with a mouse or graphical editor. The problem isn't that the mouse doesn't reward learning, but that what you learn is harder to define.

Derbasti 15y ago
There are Vim folks who know when to use the mouse, though...
nightski 15y ago
I use emacs. I don't really feel the need to defend it however. But honestly furiously typing is just not correct. Most of it is just muscle memory, not a lot of conscience thought. It takes a lot longer to switch to the mouse and click a position than to just use the built in commands. There is also the aspect that the only time my hands hurt, or I experience carpal tunnel symptoms is when using the mouse extensively (especially when gaming). I have never had pain when using the keyboard.
- Shorel 15y ago
  "It takes a lot longer to switch to the mouse and click a position than to just use the built in commands." Sure. Never mind that mediocre Starcraft players like me can perform about 100 mouse actions per minute of the sort you just described. That argument really doesn't match reality anymore.

JonnieCache 15y ago

Fun fact: this is the real reason why vinyl is so loved by DJs. See also: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Flow_(psychol...

ChuckMcM 15y ago

I've found validation in this point of view in an unexpected source, World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW has the ability to redefine the user interface through keyboard short-cuts, LUA code, and UX changes. There is an active community providing different takes on the UX. WoW has a built in 'time test' which consists of 'boss' encounters in what the game calls a 'raid'. [1] In polling characters who were better able to perform during an encounter, there was a strong correlation between "keyboard" users and better performace. Better was defined as able to respond faster and more consistently to changing conditions. It would be interesting to have Tog have a look. [1] For anyone not familiar with WoW and its gameplay, a group of 10 or 25 people, of different specialties (game specific; damage doers, healers, and damage takers (tanks)) who coordinate during an encounter with a powerful game character (a boss) by fighting it. Healers are focussed on applying various skills to keep the players alive (they take damage due to various game mechanics), damage doers (dps) use different skills to maximize their damage, and tanks use their skills to keep the game characters focussed on attacking them rather than the other players. After a set amount of time, the game character 'enrages' which basically makes it impossible to kill and it does 10x the amount of damage it normally does. This results in a 'wipe' (all player characters in the group dying).

jpenney 15y ago
If you suggested to a Starcraft 2 pro that they should stop using the keyboard shortcuts because they are slower, you would be laughed out of the building. Erik Naggum was on the ball with that one - it is impossible to acquire muscle memory for mouse movements because there is no base position from which all movement actions are performed.
- Steko 15y ago
  Wouldn't they also laugh you out of the building if you suggested they should stop using a mouse?
- alanfalcon 15y ago
  I'm replying to the specific points about Starcraft 2 here, but really this is off topic considering that nobody is actually saying Professional Gamers in the year 2011 should be compared to word processor "power users" in the year 1989. Professional Starcraft 2 players need to use hotkeys because they have to be able to do multiple tasks at once - they're macroing with their left hand while clicking around the mini-map and performing other tasks with their mouse hand. You couldn't play SC2 (well) with just the keyboard or just the mouse. As for the muscle memory for mouse movements, there's no question that Pro SC2 players have exactly that. If you watch a pro give his opening workers commands, it looks like what he's doing should be impossible. You or I couldn't sit down at a computer and do it. But they can precisely because of muscle memory: they know how far a mineral node is from the starting base and exactly what mouse movements are needed to select a worker and send him to a specific mineral patch, then select the next and so on. It's true that in Starcraft 1 this muscle memory was even more necessary as SC2 has automated (to a high degree) many tasks that once required precisely practiced mouse movements, but you still see SC2 players using those skills that they learned from Brood War.

Shorel 15y ago

I believe I perform Opera mouse gestures using just muscle memory, I really don't have to think at all. Before mouse gestures, yes, I would have agreed with that text, but not now. I genuinely browse faster with just the mouse and the gestures than with only keyboard, or with mouse+keyboard without gestures. Note: the Chrome gestures plug-in is not up to the quality of the Opera native implementation. There's no comparison.