4 ms·

I love this quote so much: ” We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: Test

by fsloth 3y ago

I love this quote so much: ” We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding. – Bruce Tognazzini ” The question one needs to ask from oneself - am I a poweruser or do I just enjoy yak shaving. I used to configure everything ”so it’s exactly right for me”. At some point I switched to mostly using default options for everything, and if given the option, choosing what ever had best default options (for myself). I like my computer use much more nowadays as stuff tends to ”just work” and I can focus on actually just doing stuff.

orzig 3y ago
Great quote, I bet it was very true in 1989 (34 years ago!) I'm not going to try to prove the opposite, but after some number of DECADES it's worth checking on followup research. Here are some good places to start: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/30682/are-there-any-recent-studies-of-the-keyboard-vs-mouse-issue https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/30682/are-there-any-r... https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4355/is-using-a-mouse-less-efficient https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4355/is-using-a...
- froh 3y ago
  thanks! and the Sceptics SO circles back here in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657135 the keyboard vs mouse controversy is an evergreen
iLemming 3y ago
> and I can focus on actually just doing stuff. Why people love blaming Emacsians for having an obsession with configuring everything "so things are exactly right for them", I will never understand. It's not about configuring for the sake of configuring. It may feel that way in the beginning, but after a while, it becomes simple to make stuff "just work," as you say. Take this simple case of dealing with URLs, for example. I share tons of URLs with my colleagues, and I have to consume tons of URLs shared with me. Every single day. So, I have a way of sharing the exact places in the code. What it does is it figures out all the relevant information: - The repo - The Git branch - Fully qualified name of a function or a line number And then it creates a Markdown Link with a description and the exact place on GitHub for that line of code. It takes me a single keystroke to share that with my teammate and I don't even have to leave my editor. My teammates may not bother with doing the same thing manually. They would just share a link without a description. And when the URL looks something like: https://github.com/foo/bar/blob/fbf7e86b8e8372e460af5a283c05f8caf9cbd0c7/blabla/yadayda/file.clj#L11 https://github.com/foo/bar/blob/fbf7e86b8e8372e460af5a283c05... it's impossible to tell what that thing is about without opening it in the browser. Well, again using a single keystroke, I can convert it to Org-Mode or Markdown. It goes to GitHub, logs in using my token (because it's in a private repo), and figures out what that thing exactly is, giving me a URL with a description. I can store it in my notes and search for it later. So the question you really need to ask yourself - are you a power user or a programmer? I am the latter, so I don't feel that writing code that makes the computer do exactly what I meant it to do is a waste of time. I write code so I can focus on actually doing stuff. And if I need to spend an hour to write some code that makes me just 0.01% more efficient, well, fuck it, why not?

by fsloth 3y ago

orzig 3y ago

Great quote, I bet it was very true in 1989 (34 years ago!) I'm not going to try to prove the opposite, but after some number of DECADES it's worth checking on followup research. Here are some good places to start: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/30682/are-there-any-recent-studies-of-the-keyboard-vs-mouse-issue https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/30682/are-there-any-r... https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4355/is-using-a-mouse-less-efficient https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4355/is-using-a...

froh 3y ago
thanks! and the Sceptics SO circles back here in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657135 the keyboard vs mouse controversy is an evergreen

iLemming 3y ago

> and I can focus on actually just doing stuff. Why people love blaming Emacsians for having an obsession with configuring everything "so things are exactly right for them", I will never understand. It's not about configuring for the sake of configuring. It may feel that way in the beginning, but after a while, it becomes simple to make stuff "just work," as you say. Take this simple case of dealing with URLs, for example. I share tons of URLs with my colleagues, and I have to consume tons of URLs shared with me. Every single day. So, I have a way of sharing the exact places in the code. What it does is it figures out all the relevant information: - The repo - The Git branch - Fully qualified name of a function or a line number And then it creates a Markdown Link with a description and the exact place on GitHub for that line of code. It takes me a single keystroke to share that with my teammate and I don't even have to leave my editor. My teammates may not bother with doing the same thing manually. They would just share a link without a description. And when the URL looks something like: https://github.com/foo/bar/blob/fbf7e86b8e8372e460af5a283c05f8caf9cbd0c7/blabla/yadayda/file.clj#L11 https://github.com/foo/bar/blob/fbf7e86b8e8372e460af5a283c05... it's impossible to tell what that thing is about without opening it in the browser. Well, again using a single keystroke, I can convert it to Org-Mode or Markdown. It goes to GitHub, logs in using my token (because it's in a private repo), and figures out what that thing exactly is, giving me a URL with a description. I can store it in my notes and search for it later. So the question you really need to ask yourself - are you a power user or a programmer? I am the latter, so I don't feel that writing code that makes the computer do exactly what I meant it to do is a waste of time. I write code so I can focus on actually doing stuff. And if I need to spend an hour to write some code that makes me just 0.01% more efficient, well, fuck it, why not?