Revisiting "Keyboard vs. The Mouse, pt 1"

blog
61

The keyboard is faster for anyone who spends time learning it. Just learning to cut, copy and paste with the shortcuts is faster than using the mouse. You can be as proficient with the mouse as you want but you can’t make the lag time that’s incurred by moving your hand from the keyboard to mouse–and back again–disappear.

And it’s not just “old coders” who realize this. I was still in diapers when RMS started GNU Emacs but it’s still a much faster way to edit than anything I’ve ever seen. I was truly in awe when I saw an emacs veteran editing and moving my Java code around with a flurry of keystrokes. It was then that I knew that no amount of two-fisting typing would match that speed.

I may still be an emacs novice but I already KNOW that CTRL+n/CTRL+v are faster ways to scroll down than moving your hand to the mouse wheel or pressing Page Down.

62

Application software could learn a lot from games. Mouse to aim (select), single key short-cuts (not ctrl+alt+whatever finger-yoga), enter to start typing.

As any vi-using old fart will tell you, a modal interface beats a lowest-common denominator unimodal interface any time. It’s the way the brain works, as natural as breathing in before speaking.

Also: the Microsoft keyboard on which I am typing this has 66 keys outside the core alphanumerical+punctuation block. None of those keys represent cut, copy, paste, bold, italics, context assist, forward, back, format painter, new tab, preferences: few of them are any operation you might want to perform as often as once every 6 months.

63

I typed “orange” cos I knew it was there, not because I could see it.

The inserted replies are completely unreadable.

Happy Spaghetti Tree Day!

64

Jeff - love the new look!

Just wanted to chime-in with the other lefties - I’m a left-handed person who got used to using the mouse in his right hand, simply because of the amount of time I spent working with other people/at other people’s desks, etc. I don’t switch around the buttons either, something I’ve seen many left handed people do.

It’s strange how the computer world deals with lefties, because in my experience there is a much higher proportion of software developers and graphic designers who are left-handed than in the more general trades across the population. I would guess it’s closer to 1 in 4, not 1 in 9, and so you’d think more software would be designed with attention to the fact that people have different dominant hands.

65

I’m right-handed but use the mouse left-handed. That way it is easy
to write down things while browsing documents or you can answer
a phone call (headset), then surf the web (boring phone call) and
still write down a “calling memo”.

I know two types of work:

  1. two-handed on the keyboard (Unix Admin) and I really
    hate to take my hands of the keyboard to do something else.
    (these are the hours I should really get paid for)
  2. One-handed on the mouse (chin rests in second hand).
    (Check out: from the way people do one-handed computing you
    can tell if they are surfing the web for fun or do some
    real work - really true!)

And then I know mode no. 3, which I use at home only:
The famous WSAD-mouse ego-shooter mode.

while surfing the web and an

66

Just a remark, Jeff - the title ‘hoding horror’ wonderfully carved in ASCII at the top of the page gets uglishly underlined when you hover mouse over it.

But it’s a good blog anyway:)

67

Hmmm. I’m suprised that no one has brought up the KLM-GOMS model. Determining the time in seconds for a practiced user to complete a sequence of operators (using keyboard, or mouse or both) in a given interface has been possible for 10ish years. You can simply plug in research data for each operation (move hands to mouse, click button, release button, move mouse, etc) and get a measurement for the time it takes to complete the sequence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLM_(human-computer_interaction)

If you wanted to get really precise about it, you could apply Fitt’s in your KLM-GOMS analysis to figure out exactly how long it takes to move the mouse to a control (given both the size of the control and distace away).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts’_law

68

April 1st, very funny!!! I’ve got a headache, thanks Jeff :wink:

69

Me LIKE green screen look! April fool or no, it’s lurvely.

70

Gahhh, i so fell for it. Nicely done!

71

“Eye following but how do you click?
By blinking, or double blinking perhaps…”

Try not clicking on something every two to ten seconds (which is the average blink rate) … oh and make sure you are not distracted when you do it …

72

Two fisted computing!
The best complex application that takes this to heart is Blender 3D. Never has it been more painful to learn a program, but most rewarding afterwords. (The two-fisted way, isn’t that the wrong way? Yes, but faster)

73

Just like when writing code, you need to focus optimizations on things that are done the most frequently.

For example, in Photoshop, you can get huge productivity gains by learning the keyboard shortcuts for switching tools instead of clicking on the tool tray. M is for marquee, B is for brush, T is for text, etc. To grab and move the image, you can use the space bar (instead of scrolling around with the scroll bars. The arrow keys can be used for more fine-tuned movement (because who has pixel-precise motor control of their mouse hand?)

Less commonly used operations have slightly more complex keyboard shortcuts. For example, merging a layer down is Ctrl+E.

But operations such as applying a Gaussian Blur to the current selection do not have a keyboard shortcut. It just doesn’t meet the common usage bar that justifies a shortcut, compared to the other operations. Given the number of filters available, you wouldn’t get any significant productivity gains by providing shortcuts, because the number of filters available is going to be well beyond most people’s ability to memorize. Once you have to do something like Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G for a blur effect, and remember four-key combinations for 50+ filters, it becomes much easier to just use your mouse to pick it from a menu.

What about people who want to apply Gaussian blurs all the time? Photoshop does provide a “last filter” shortcut, Ctrl+F, so you only need to pick a filter with the mouse when you’re going to be using a new filter.

74

I think people are habituated of using both mouse as well as keyboard. One uses mouse or keyboard at the required place according to the priority to minimize time.to get the work done.

75

QUOTE
However, as Tog himself notes, when the keyboard shortcut is already memorized and well understood, it’s a clear productivity win.
/QUOTE

I don’t see Tog saying that at all. The whole article is very damning of keyboard users, with only one exception, Control X C V, and only because those keys can be used in combination with the mouse.

QUOTE
And, in fact, I find myself on the opposite side in at least one instance, namely editing. By using Command X, C, and V, the user can select with one hand and act with the other. Two-handed input. Two-handed input can result in solid productivity gains (Buxton 1986).
/QUOTE

The ‘opposite side’ being the ‘keyboard users who feel like they have gained two seconds over the mouse, but in fact have lost time because of amnesia’ crowd.

Spending $50 million on RD, doesn’t prove that what you are saying is true.

In this case, it seems the only thing their $50 million did was prove that you can fork over $50 million and get bogus data in return.

It’s thinking like this that has made so much software unusable without a mouse.

An example: switching input to different controls in web pages.

Load up imdb.com and try to use the tab key to switch to the search input box.

In IE7 it will take 29 tab presses to get there.
In Firefox, 22 tab presses.
In Opera, 2 tab presses. TWO.

Just because some action is stupidly slow to do with the keyboard only now, doesn’t mean that it has to be that way.

Not that I’m an anti mouse guy, if I had $50 million that I needed to throw away, I would do a study that showed that keyboards with a good pointing stick(1) were the most efficient way to go for most things, and Doom/Skulltag are completely unplayable without a good mouse.

(1) IBM/Lenovo keyboards with the bowl tip pointing sticks, NOT the horrible Dell pointing sticks.

76

Love the shortcuts, but me still need the mouse for fragging friends in CounterStrike.

77

I think there is no such thing as the “right” or “fastest” way to interact with a computer. It mostly depends on the kind of task you are working on, and your personal prefarences. For text centric taks, like coding or writing a letter, the keyboard would be the preferred way to interact also for commands, like saving or cp. But I can’t really image drawing apicture with my keyboard :slight_smile:
And besides, if you are one of those people not able to memorize a few shortcuts… you won’t have any fun with stuff like vim or wmii at all.

78

I find this really amusing (the whole website) :slight_smile:

Keyboard v mouse? Yeah, mix and match… Keyboards don’t work if you’ve got shortcuts like Ctrl+Shift+Tab+SomeOtherKey…

79

Mouse is going to die as a form of input long long before keyboard will.

Touch screens and eye tracking will completely replace mouse very soon. However keyboard will still be much more faster and productive than voice input atleast for input tasks requiring more than just common english such as programming and editing tasks.

80

I’m left-handed and use my left hand to control the mouse.

When I choose to save a file using CTRL+S, I move my left hand from the mouse to the keyboard and back again. For applications that provide a ‘save file’ icon (as opposed to selecting File Save), the time required for both the keyboard and mouse methods can often appear to be an even match.

It would be interesting to hear the thoughts of other left-handed people out there and how their experiences differ from the right-handed majority.