4 ms·
Reading comprehension, folks, seriously -_-' All your arguments is either `but keyboard feels faster', or `there are some actions slow to do with mouse'. The fo
by dexen 15y ago
Reading comprehension, folks, seriously -_-' All your arguments is either `but keyboard feels faster', or `there are some actions slow to do with mouse'. The former is addressed in the article:
> While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish.
It's there, plain and simple: keyboarding around switches off (or busy-waits) a part of our brain, while providing nice tactile and quantized visual (every character stop) stimuli in regular interval. It feels faster, because that's how our brain is wired to measure time.
On the other hand, mousing around doesn't provide any cool stimuli until you actually activate the target widget. It feels long-ish, because the brain has to constantly work on adjusting cursor trajectory and nothing serious happens till you actually activate the widget.
The later argument is the case of rarely used commands. Of course ^S or ^P is faster than hunting the `Save...' or `Print...' through modern long menus, but that's an exception; an action to be taken once every few minutes. Manipulating text tokens and blocks (that's what we do most often, right?) is inherently faster with mouse than with Vim-ish or EMACS-ish regexps. Same for browsing hyper-text documentation or 'net forums.
Tell me you can select and move around a word, line or block of code faster with regexps than with mouse, and I'll gladly do it faster with mouse. On the average, anyway, which is what matters in the longer run.
- jff 15y agoAddendum: When you watch somebody working with Vim, and he looks so fast... consider that it's probably you hearing and seeing the massive stream of ^D^D^Djjjjjj3yykkkkkkkkp he has to type to find a chunk of text, yank it, and move it a few lines up. And that was me being generous, assuming he needs to cut 3 entire lines, not parts of a line. Working with the mouse looks slow because it's just a few clicks and maybe a keystroke or two.
- BasDirks 15y ago/foo<CR> 3yy /bar<CR> p
- Someone 15y ago…with thinking pauses a) figuring out what to search for: /fo or /foo or even /foo\. and b) for checking that your idea about the search term was correct. Repeat for the search for 'bar' I am not claiming that this isn't faster for you or in general, but Tog has/had data to defend his claims, and data that that introspection can be unreliable in judging task duration. All you (and I) give are anecdotes.
- BasDirks 15y agono for the thinking pauses: _thinking in code_ is an advantage.
- dexen 15y ago- left double-click (== select word, line, tag or block, context-sensitive) - left-middle (== cut) - mouse move - left-right (== paste)
- BasDirks 15y agoprepend: - move hand from keyboard to mouse append: - move hand from mouse to keyboard