Revisiting "Keyboard vs. The Mouse, pt 1"

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“Eye control” is never going to happen, because nobody can control their eyes as steadily as a mouse. Eyes wander erratically all over the place; imagine watching your cursor jumping around the screen all day.

PS. I agree with the consensus here. Each input method has its uses, and using them wisely together is very productive. Which is why I am constantly amazed to see co-workers, programmers like myself, doing something as brain-dead as using the “Edit|Paste” menu in the middle of typing, or clicking to get from one text box to the next.

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I am also of the ‘two-fisted’ school and it constantly amazes me that everyone is not. Some functions (particularly in the learning phase) are best moused; others (particularly once the program is grokked) cry out to be keyboarded. Jobs, Gates, somebody at Xerox Park – whomever crafted the first ‘ZXCV’ string created a beautiful thing.

Bill

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I don’t use mice except occasionally for gaming, I’m all about the Trackpoint. No idea if it’s really faster but I like not moving my hands off the keyboard. I use it on both my laptops and desktops. It’s also nice just using your lap and not needing a flat surface.

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What would be interesting is to see how the size of the screen impacts the mousing time. This research definitely is out of date and should be redone. There are a lot of variables to control for: screen size, application familiarity, menu design (eg, ribbons), left vs right handed, task (word processing, programming, photo editing, etc)

That decision time Tog referred to? I don’t think “Copy, what do I do? Oh yeah, Control-C” - it is just control-c.

I liked the idea of progression of scale from MattF - that seems right to me.

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My software is icon/graphical in nature. 90% of my coding is mouse intensive. I don’t mind. Mouse in one hand, cup of coffee in the other.

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Hey Sergio you’re absolutely right! I happened to have my hand on my chin just as I read your post!

I find that when I’m browsing through code, I’m driving with one hand only…if I have to reach from my chin to touch my keyboard, it’s a chore :slight_smile:

Likewise when coding or typing for having to use the mouse!

kashif

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I am curious if anyone has experienced greater productivity using mouse gestures. I haven’t delved into too much myself, but squiggling an S with the mouse could be just as fast as Control+S.

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The problem with shortcuts is just as with mouse buttons, there are too many of them. I use many different applications, platforms, etc. when coding in Visual Studio, for example, I certainly know CTRL-S saves, but I often find I don’t want to save. I want “Save All” and for that I click the little button in the toolbar with the mouse.

Honestly, that last time I really knew a whole app’s bindings was DOS Wordperfect and that was due to a long time with the function key template over the keyboard. Most apps, however, only need a few. One can go many years of coding in emacs only knowing “ctrl-x, ctrl-c”

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I have done the experiment a few times this week. Unplugging my mouse for an hour or more, and trying to survive.

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non issue, who cares as a developer do both keyboard shortcuts, preferably customisable (but with sensible/standard defaults) and a good GUI for the mouse to play in.

let your user make the choice which is better for them

keyboard shortcuts are nice, I use them for programs I use a lot (where it is worth learning them) for other stuff I use the mouse.

wish OS X would pinch the ‘hold alt key down to drive the menu’ method, there is something i’m sure but thats easy

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I’ve gone without a mouse before too. I have a wireless mouse and keyboard and when the batteries go dead in the mouse I try to drudge around with the keyboard which usually results in getting up quickly to swap the batteries out (and yes they are rechargeable).

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This is reason number one that I give to myself for not enabling “full” keyboard control navigation on OS X – I only use text field switching. This forces me to use both hands and, I feel, has made me slightly faster; I don’t try to do with the keyboard what I can usually do faster with the mouse, and this makes using the mouse mandatory in most of these situation.

(The second reason is, it’s not on by default and I need to test apps in the default used-by-most-users configuration for obvious reasons.)

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One other interesting aspect would be to look at the effect of different keyboard layouts. For instance, ZXCV are all nicely placed for QWERTY, but with Dvorak, they are really scattered. (Z is on the / key, which is nice because it’s just the mirror image. X is on the B key, which isn’t too bad. C is on the I key, which can be a bit awkward to hit for a while. V is on the . key, which is usually fine, but in some programs is very annoying: right next to it is W (on the , key), which means it’s easy to hit ctrl-W (close window/tab) when you want to hit ctrl-V.) Other programs are designed for ease of use with QWERTY and are worse with Dvorak.

I love the Dvorak layout and don’t regret it in the least, but it can sometimes be annoying. Some systems have a layout that normally works like Dvorak but switches to QWERTY when ctrl/apple is held down, but this seems like it’d just be confusing.

@Josh: “I am curious if anyone has experienced greater productivity using mouse gestures. I haven’t delved into too much myself, but squiggling an S with the mouse could be just as fast as Control+S.”

Depends on how good the gesture system is. Doing something as intricate as an ‘S’ would, I think, be quite difficult unless the system allowed a lot of error. (Disclaimer: I’m left-handed most of the time, but mouse with my right hand. I’m less precise than some people are.) I used gestures in Firefox for a while. I found forward and backward indispensable (click, drag left/right, release); at times, I would switch into IE and try to do the same and have it not work. It’s like the mouse wheel, when you would sit down at a computer that didn’t have one and instinctively try to scroll with it anyway, but rather less strong. I would also often use the new tab gesture (click, drag up, release), but also often not; I usually would move my hands to the keyboard to enter the URL anyway, so would usually just do ctrl-T. I would sometimes use the close-tab gesture (click, drag right, left, right, release), but I found that even something that complex I sometimes got wrong, and it was usually just faster to hit ctrl-F4, at least if my hand was on the keyboard.

@Nicolas: “I have done the experiment a few times this week. Unplugging my mouse for an hour or more, and trying to survive.”

My mouse does that for me every so often when I don’t pay enough attention to the batter indicator. Usually it happens at inopportune times.

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I use the IBM ThinkPad keyboard with UltraNav, or whatever the little pin is called, so I don’t have to lift my hand to use the “mouse”. Ownez. And it’s small to.

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@Sergio

QUOTE
This is all about perspective. If one wanted to side with the mouse users, the list could have been re-written:
1 - Take your right hand off the mouse
2 - Take your left hand off your chin
3 - Press and hold ALT
4 - Press S
5 - Release S
6 - Put your hight hand back on the mouse
7 - Put you left hand back on your chin

Versus

1 - Click the floppy disk icon on the toolbar
/QUOTE

Ok first I laughed out loud because I was in fact sitting there reading this post with my chin propped on my left hand. But steps 1 and 6 are not needed since you can do all of this with your left hand.

But to get to the point of the article. First level keyboard navigation and mouse navigation are equivalent in today’s applications. It’s the repetitive mind numbing stuff that is multiple levels down that requires keyboard shortcuts.

And not that ALT hotkey stuff. Rule of them, if I might do it more then 2 times repeatedly, then put in a keyboard shortcut.

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Well this keyboard vs mouse thing is not an issue if you own Thinkpad with “red thing”. The best thing about it, that you don’t have to move your hand, you could just move one finger. : )

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This is a dumb argument, keyboard vs mouse. It varies completely on the situation. Sure, when saving a document, ctrl-s is much faster, but as someone pointed out, the save toolbar button makes it almost trivial. Then there are things like browsing the web. Have you ever tried with out a mouse? Sure it’s possible, tab, tab, tab, tab. Ya someone could write a clever Firefox plugin to make it better, but why? Mice and keyboards complement each other; the trick is to know how to leverage both.

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“stranded” at the (Unix) command prompt?? I prefer to be there, most of the time…

OK, I have been, at times, but I’ve also been “stranded” without a mouse. Which is why I believe both (mouse keyboarding skills) are important. Keyboarding will always be my katana, but no warrior should be without the long and the short. Which is which, is of course, a matter of personal taste.

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Advantage of the mouse: the computer can track where you’re thinking of clicking. Very few apps yet make use of this, instead being blind to what precedes the click.

But what happens when we have touch interfaces? Assuming they make the interface click somehow when you press on it, they will replace the mouse/keyboard/screen.

I’m waiting for something like half an AlphaGrip for my left hand, complete with easy Ctrl-ZXCV access, and perhaps some modified mouse in my right - maybe some buttons around a normal mouse. I think that’s the answer - combine the two, then the point will become moot.

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It’s easy: Old coders can’t use a mouse, so for them the keyboard is always faster. They even look at the mouse before moving it !

But I don’t know a single programmer from my generation that’s not also a gamer.

And we are very, VERY proficient with the mouse.

Selecting, copying and moving text is always faster with the mouse.

Some other things are faster with the keyboard.

But don’t listen only to old geezers that have only used Emacs or Vi or some similar ancient software.