4 ms·

Some of those mouse (touchpad for me) gestures could be useful, like splitting a buffer in two. If it's the current buffer, C-x 2 and C-x 3 feel faster. If it's

Some of those mouse (touchpad for me) gestures could be useful, like splitting a buffer in two. If it's the current buffer, C-x 2 and C-x 3 feel faster. If it's another one probably the gesture is faster. They are also easy to remember. Some other gestures are puzzling, like > Middle click to paste a link from the clipboard. (This is only for clarity, it’s unrelated to the actual action.) Then use a mouse gesture to git-clone from that link to a prespecified directory. I wonder how many times per day one has to clone repositories before one could remember that the gesture for that exists and how to perform it in the right way. It takes training. I clone repositories not every month, maybe I even spent at least one full year without cloning anything (long running projects.) But OK, I'm sure there are people that have to work with many different repositories at least every week.

eichin 3y ago
Raskin's version of Tog's point (in the article) is more nuanced - switching between keyboard and mouse is the expensive thing and even more "perceptually underreported" than either of them on their own. (That said, my workflow involves cloning as often as a couple of times a day if things are going well; SSD space is basically free, and --reference-if-able means a clone-per-branch is cheap, and my "work on this" script spins up a docker image and a fresh build too, after cloning and switching. So, while the described shortcuts would make sense in my "world", I've already automated way beyond that :-)
- pmontra 3y ago
  To test my intuition: as a two-to-five clones per day person, do you think that you could benefit from that gesture, if you didn't need to automate the process around it?
  - eichin 3y ago
    If I were already using the mouse for the cut&paste step, yeah, it would flow from one to the other. (In practice, I do both the cut-whole-url and paste steps entirely from the keyboard anyway, so using a gesture at all would be flow-breaking. But if I were mousing for the surrounding work it would make sense.) (I've actually had mouse-based workflows sometimes - I normally prefer a trackpoint, not as a mouse substitute but as "save me from doing weird contortions to keyboard-orient absolutely everything" - but the times when I've been a tech lead and spending excessive time in spreadsheets and planning apps, I've hooked up a relatively fancy mouse and started to develop more mouse-oriented shortcuts. Fortunately I've escaped from that :-)

eichin 3y ago

Raskin's version of Tog's point (in the article) is more nuanced - switching between keyboard and mouse is the expensive thing and even more "perceptually underreported" than either of them on their own. (That said, my workflow involves cloning as often as a couple of times a day if things are going well; SSD space is basically free, and --reference-if-able means a clone-per-branch is cheap, and my "work on this" script spins up a docker image and a fresh build too, after cloning and switching. So, while the described shortcuts would make sense in my "world", I've already automated way beyond that :-)

pmontra 3y ago
To test my intuition: as a two-to-five clones per day person, do you think that you could benefit from that gesture, if you didn't need to automate the process around it?
- eichin 3y ago
  If I were already using the mouse for the cut&paste step, yeah, it would flow from one to the other. (In practice, I do both the cut-whole-url and paste steps entirely from the keyboard anyway, so using a gesture at all would be flow-breaking. But if I were mousing for the surrounding work it would make sense.) (I've actually had mouse-based workflows sometimes - I normally prefer a trackpoint, not as a mouse substitute but as "save me from doing weird contortions to keyboard-orient absolutely everything" - but the times when I've been a tech lead and spending excessive time in spreadsheets and planning apps, I've hooked up a relatively fancy mouse and started to develop more mouse-oriented shortcuts. Fortunately I've escaped from that :-)