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> irrational fear of the mouse dominates amongst Un*x dogmatists. Be it because their tools don’t integrate, or because it is a symbol or rebellion, a means to

> irrational fear of the mouse dominates amongst Un*x dogmatists. Be it because their tools don’t integrate, or because it is a symbol or rebellion, a means to differentiate their prior ignorance from the enlightenment they have attained Or maybe we've learned something in the decades we've been working, since before you were actually born. Get off my lawn know-it-all college kid!

pjmlp 5y ago
Having started UNIX on Xenix, followed by DG/UX with twm like window manager, and an heavy XEmacs user during its heyday, I agree with the know-it-all college kid.
- trabant00 5y ago
  What exactly do you agree? That I'm not allowed to like my keyboard focused setup? That I can't avoid the mouse as much as I want? That he should be sarcastic with people who like to work a certain away after working for longer that he has lived?
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    You're allowed to do _all_ of that. Just don't force others to have to do the same. And yes, I used mice at a time where the middle button actually had been a button ;).
  - ebiester 5y ago
    But that's the thing - the article author is talking about a context menu, which by default means that everything from the context menu can be done by keyboard means. As for me, I'm another greybeard that doesn't need a mouse, but defaults to using it over a keyboard-only setup. Keyboard shortcuts are great for things that are frequently done, but I'd rather not spend the time to remember rarely-used features.
narraturgy 5y ago
I'm relatively young, only 30, but I have the "privilege" to work on a variety of 90s-era windows-based systems. Everything is mouse-driven. When you have to use the mouse to navigate between multiple nested GUI pages, and each one has a couple seconds of load time, and the button to get to the next level is in another spot relatively to where the previous button you clicked was, it takes hours of your day just navigating between contexts over the course of an entire work day. People who think my fear/hatred of the mouse is irrational have never had to work on the irrational systems and terrible UX that the widescale prevalence mouse has enabled.
- microtherion 5y ago
  Your youthful innocence presumably shielded you from having had to work with the corresponding keyboard driven text menu systems that preceded these mouse based GUI systems. I assure you that they could be far less pleasant to use. Granted, for any input modality, there are better and worse designs using it, but when designed properly, having an additional modality available can never be a disadvantage. When a newer modality replaces, rather than supplements, an older one, the benefits are often more debatable.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    That's interesting, most of the accounts I've heard were that the text mode stuff was vastly superior, because once you knew the interface you could type ahead regardless of how slowly it actually loaded. Are you referring to the difficulty of picking things up in the first place, or am I unaware of some other difficulty that it had?
    - microtherion 5y ago
      * Poor discoverability, as you said. * Poor availability of navigation options other than linear order. * Poor availability of editing / correction / undo (and conversely, there often was an easy to hit (deliberately or accidentally) button that would erase everything on the screen so you could start over. Users sometimes trained themselves to use that for any correction, because it WAS effectively superior to other available correction methods). As an anecdote, in one job, I encountered a text based application for parts inventory management in a garage. The only way to look up parts was to type their full, exact name (And in our country, mechanics were not necessarily solid speakers of the local language). The programmer didn't see a problem with this, arguing that his design promoted enhanced literacy among his users…
daptaq 5y ago
I agree, but we might be imagining different things under the term "Un*x dogmatists".

pjmlp 5y ago

Having started UNIX on Xenix, followed by DG/UX with twm like window manager, and an heavy XEmacs user during its heyday, I agree with the know-it-all college kid.

trabant00 5y ago
What exactly do you agree? That I'm not allowed to like my keyboard focused setup? That I can't avoid the mouse as much as I want? That he should be sarcastic with people who like to work a certain away after working for longer that he has lived?
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  You're allowed to do _all_ of that. Just don't force others to have to do the same. And yes, I used mice at a time where the middle button actually had been a button ;).
- ebiester 5y ago
  But that's the thing - the article author is talking about a context menu, which by default means that everything from the context menu can be done by keyboard means. As for me, I'm another greybeard that doesn't need a mouse, but defaults to using it over a keyboard-only setup. Keyboard shortcuts are great for things that are frequently done, but I'd rather not spend the time to remember rarely-used features.

narraturgy 5y ago

I'm relatively young, only 30, but I have the "privilege" to work on a variety of 90s-era windows-based systems. Everything is mouse-driven. When you have to use the mouse to navigate between multiple nested GUI pages, and each one has a couple seconds of load time, and the button to get to the next level is in another spot relatively to where the previous button you clicked was, it takes hours of your day just navigating between contexts over the course of an entire work day. People who think my fear/hatred of the mouse is irrational have never had to work on the irrational systems and terrible UX that the widescale prevalence mouse has enabled.

microtherion 5y ago
Your youthful innocence presumably shielded you from having had to work with the corresponding keyboard driven text menu systems that preceded these mouse based GUI systems. I assure you that they could be far less pleasant to use. Granted, for any input modality, there are better and worse designs using it, but when designed properly, having an additional modality available can never be a disadvantage. When a newer modality replaces, rather than supplements, an older one, the benefits are often more debatable.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  That's interesting, most of the accounts I've heard were that the text mode stuff was vastly superior, because once you knew the interface you could type ahead regardless of how slowly it actually loaded. Are you referring to the difficulty of picking things up in the first place, or am I unaware of some other difficulty that it had?
  - microtherion 5y ago
    * Poor discoverability, as you said. * Poor availability of navigation options other than linear order. * Poor availability of editing / correction / undo (and conversely, there often was an easy to hit (deliberately or accidentally) button that would erase everything on the screen so you could start over. Users sometimes trained themselves to use that for any correction, because it WAS effectively superior to other available correction methods). As an anecdote, in one job, I encountered a text based application for parts inventory management in a garage. The only way to look up parts was to type their full, exact name (And in our country, mechanics were not necessarily solid speakers of the local language). The programmer didn't see a problem with this, arguing that his design promoted enhanced literacy among his users…

daptaq 5y ago

I agree, but we might be imagining different things under the term "Un*x dogmatists".