If executing `Print' command is your top priority, you're a Federal Reserve employee, not an enterpreneur/programmer/tech enthusiast.</sarcasm> Thinking, readi

If executing `Print' command is your top priority, you're a Federal Reserve employee, not an enterpreneur/programmer/tech enthusiast.</sarcasm> Thinking, reading & browsing, writting -- those should take the most time in front of the computer, in that order. If you write more than think, you're either Don Knuth (hi there, Professor!) or using some VisualBasic 1.0 Verbose Edition. If you write more than read, you're working on a three-file project that only calls a few stdlib functions. My point? That's not where the money is. What you want is to make software for an pre-existing ecosystem of other software. Re-use code, build upon ready-made libraries and services. You get to think of how to interact with them, you get to browse the docs, jump around code a bit, pinpoint the right place and then type. Just a little, because you're using a high-level language. Thinking? No idea how that interacts with the mouse. Except that being able to hold a snack or mug in the other hand helps sometimes ;-) Browsing? Sure there is Vimperator [1], but most of the time you want mouse to browse docs and code efficiently. You want to use it profficiently, and you want an editor that treats your code (and possibly data, like Adminer [2] does for SQL DBs) as hypertext. Occasional ^F, sure, but that doesn't dominate. You can search with mouse, it's faster. Programming? You work on various chunks of code or data. A block, a line, a word, a tag (if you are an XML person). All that's fast to indicate, search, select, copy, move etc. with mouse and proper editor [3] that doesn't force you to go through menus or toolbars. You want to click on the right FILE:LINE in compiler's error output and see it in editor, not keyboard through the output or manually input FILE:LINE it into editor when it's right there on your screen. Of course keyboarding feels like it's doing that faster, but see the original article about why appearances are misleading here. And yes, I've seen folks still using the old right-click, pop-up-menu, going all the way to `Cut' and then right-click, pop-up-menu, all the way to `Paste'. That's kind of backward and bloody sad, but not by itself a counter-argument against fast work with mouse. ---- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimperator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimperator [2] http://www.adminer.org/ http://www.adminer.org/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)