Even for like 20 years after mousing became the primary interface, you could still navigate much faster using keyboard shortcuts / accelerator keys. Application designers no longer consider that feature. Now you are obliged to constantly take your fingers off home position, find the mouse, move it 3cm, aim it carefully, click, and move your hand back to home position, an operation taking a couple of seconds or more, when the equivalent keyboard commands could have been issued in a couple hundred milliseconds.
I don’t think mice were a mistake, but they’re worse for most of the tasks I do. I’m a software engineer and I suck at art, so I just need to write, compile, and test code.
There are some things a mouse is way better for:
drawing (well, a drawing tablet is better)
3d modeling
editing photos
first person shooters (KB works fine for OG Doom though)
bulk file operations (a decent KB interface could work though)
But for almost everything else, I prefer a keyboard.
And while we’re on a tangent, I hate WASD, why shift my fingers over from the normal home row position? It should be ESDF, which feels way more natural…
Thanks, I got you beat on ESDF though because i’m a RDFG man, since playing counter strike 1.6. With WASD they usually put crouch or something on ctrl but my pinky has a hard time stretching down there, but on RDFG my pinky has easy access to QW AS ZX, and tab caps and shift with a little stretch. It’s come in handy when playing games with a lot of keybinds.
What pisses me off even more is many games bind to the letter instead of physical key position (e.g. key code), so alternative layouts get a big middle finger. I use Dvorak, and I’ve quit fighting and just switch to QWERTY for games.
I don’t have a problem with hitting control (I guess I have big hands), but I totally agree that default key binds largely suck. I wish games came with a handful of popular ones, and bound to key codes so hs Dvorak users (or international users) didn’t have to keep switching to QWERTY.
I always rebind to ESDF if the game doesn’t do stupid things preventing it from being practical. The addition of the 1QAZ strip being available to the pinky is a killer feature all on its own. I typically use that for weapon switching, instead of having to stretch up to 1234 and take my fingers off the movement keys.
Tablets are better than mice at drawing, modelling, and photo editing. Mice are good for first person shooters. Game controllers are better for most other games. You can mouse in dired-mode i guess, if you’re a casual.
The problem is they generally use E and F for something, which results in a cascade of rebinding.
And yeah, tablets are better, but they’re also more expensive and don’t do other mice things. For how rarely I do 3D modeling and whatnot (pretty rare), making sure my mouse has a middle button is plenty.
And yeah, I much prefer controller, even for FPS since I don’t play competitively (even then, I’ve seen awesome videos about gyro aiming).
E and F is certainly is a problem, but developing your own custom key map is almost always part of a larger process of becoming more effective anyway. Typically I start by just moving all left-hand bindings right by one key.
I feel like the mouse is a good generalist, jack of all trades input device, but outside of fps, I feel that any task that quote requires unquote a mouse is done better with a tablet. They are of equivalent price, honestly. Mice are not cheap, tablets are not expensive.
Right now I am using voice dictation because it is better than typing on a phone, but oh my God it sucks so bad.
I generally don’t play the same game consistently and rarely spend more than 40 hours (usually 10-15) in a given game. For most of the games I spend more time in, it’s either mouse driven (most strategy games) or I use a controller (most third person/top down games). And for the few I play that use WASD, my kids also play on my computer (e.g. Minecraft).
So I just don’t edit keybindings very often. I actually sometimes avoid playing WASD games because fixing the keys is a pain, especially when some games don’t update the in-game hints or don’t warm when there’s a collision (silently unbinds the key). It’s annoying and I don’t understand why it was ever a thing.
Takes thousands of hours just to git gud! I play for the sense of fluency and control that only comes with extending your sense of body and self into the game world. I play strategy games to relax, but I play my mains to channel the torrents of energy swirling around in my head.
It’s also an age thing. My visual processing is getting worse and worse. My disorientation facing a busy screen with literally thousands of objects that can be interacted with by mouse is a cognitive drain compared to a textual interface where I do most of the work abstractly without having to use visual processing at all. Like reading a book vs watching a movie.
I probably have a lot more experience using pre-mouse era computers than most people. It’s like being asked to start using a different language when you are 20. Yeah, you’ll become perfectly fluent for a couple decades… but you’ll also lose that language first when you get old.
I have noticed that millenials navigate multilayer mouse interfaces (like going down a few chained drop down menus) way faster than I ever did. And zoomers use touch screen keyboards almost as well as I ever touchtyped. Brains are only plastic to a degree, and it just plain feels good to use all those neurons that you first laid down when you were young and your mind was infinite.
That functionality (first necessary, then required by guidelines, then expected, and then still usual) disciplined UI designers to make things doable in a clear sequence of actions.
Now they think any ape can make a UI if it knows the new shiny buzzwords like “material design” or “air” or whatever. And they do! Except humans can’t use those UIs.
BTW, about their “air”. One can look at ancient UI paradigms, specifically SunView, OpenLook and Motif (I’m currently excited about Sun history again), Windows 3.*, and also Win9x (with WinXP being more or less inside the same paradigm). And one can see that of these only Motif had anything resembling their “air”. And Motif is generally considered clunky and less usable than the rest of the mentioned (I personally consider OpenLook the best), but compared to modern UIs even Motif does that “air” part the way it seems to make some sense, and feels less clunky, making me wonder how is that even possible.
FFS, modern UI designers don’t even think it’s necessary to clearly and consistently separate buttons and links from text.
And also - freedom in Web and UI design has proven to be a mistake. UIs should be native. Web browsers should display pages adaptively (we have such and such blocks of text and such and such links), their appearance should be decided on the client and be native too, except pictures. Gemini is the right way to go for the Web.
I feel your pain and irrelevancy with crystalline clarity. The world isn’t interested in doing things the right way, or even in a good way; consumers are too perversely enthralled by capital’s interests. I kind of hate that computers ever became a consumer good.
I love trackballs (except that Kensington above. It was basically a pinch your skin torture device.) I still use the Logitech M570 trackball. It’s pretty good.
My favorite of all time though was the Logitech Trackman Vista. Absolutely perfect form factor that Logitech just gave up on one day and I will never know why.
Well the beauty of it was that it was comfortable to use with index finger or thumb. Which was nice when you were doing something precise or wanted to do something that involved a lot of broad movement.
When I’m “computering” for efficiency, I don’t take my hands off the keyboard. Half of my job is on a standard keyboard, and so familiarizing myself with all the shortcuts and whatnot saves a lot of time versus having to travel back and forth to a mouse or track pad.
When I am just satisfying the dopamine urges, it’s mouse all the way.
Sure, it’s not 100% better in all situations. But when you’re unfamiliar with something, almost universally, it’s far more intuitive.
And this doesn’t even take into account things like gaming. I also can’t imagine trying to do visual design things solely with the computer. Like any type of drawing or schematic design.
Being pretty adept at using the keyboard, I’m often frustrated when I find out that the only way to do something is by mouse when there appears that there should be an easy way to do it by keyboard. But, man, I can’t imagine longing for the days before the mouse.
Yes, the mouse is useful in many situations (esp 3d modeling), so I don’t think anyone is arguing that it shouldn’t exist.
The problem, however, is that we’ve standardized on it for everything, to the point where software often ignores a better KB-driven workflow because the mouse one is good enough. “When all you have is a hammer…”
We’ve prioritized “intuitive” over “efficient.” There’s nothing wrong with learning to properly use a tool, and it’s sad that we don’t expect users to put in that modicum of effort. In the 80s and 90s, that’s just how things were, you either learn the tools (often with a handbook) or you don’t use them. The net result was a populace that didn’t need support as much, because they were used to reading the docs. If a component died, the docs would tell you how to diagnose and fix it. These days, those docs just don’t exist, so if the solution isn’t intuitive, you replace it (both hardware and software).
That’s where this frustration comes from. Making things intuitive also means reducing the average person’s understanding of their tools, and the mouse is a symptom of that shift.
I would argue, overall, it’s more efficient to aim for the former than the latter, especially if we are talking about the wide range of people who need to use a computer.
But I’m curious as to the “actions per minute” type of efficiency that people are talking about here. I’m an engineer, who has moved into computer programming. I would say the bottleneck for me is never that I have to move my hand to my mouse, but it’s always about thinking and planning. I feel like this “it’s so much more efficient” is viewing us as almost machines that are just trying to output actions, rather than think through and solve problems.
The net result was a populace that didn’t need support as much, because they were used to reading the docs. If a component died, the docs would tell you how to diagnose and fix it.
I think this is more of a problem that it went from an extremely niche thing, to something that almost everyone is required to use, rather than a move away from keyboard only. Or, maybe, the rise of the mouse opened the computer to everyone being able to use it, which is why it has become so ubiquitous.
To me it’s more about ergonomics. Most of my time is spent reading code and sending messages. I use ViM or at least ViM bindings for reading code because it’s so much nicer for navigating code than clicking and scrolling:
go to definition? - gd
find in file? - /query
match braces/quotes? - %
I’m not saying everyone should learn ViM, I’m just using it as an example. I’m much less concerned about maximizing my text entry speed and more interested in maximizing ergonomics of the tools I use the most every day. For me that’s my text editor and terminal, followed closely by my browser.
I have no problem with a good mouse UI (I love mouse mode in ViM), my problem is when there isn’t an alternative power user UX (shortcuts and whatnot).
This extends to a ton of things. Let’s say you want to search for a file, but the GUI indexed search isn’t working properly (maybe it didn’t index your file? Or maybe you need more than string contains?). If you’re comfortable on the CLI and understand regex, you’re set. Or maybe you need to do some bulk change across files, the CLI is going to be really efficient. It’s less about total productivity but not having to do stupid repetitive tasks because that’s my only option. I’d much rather write a script than do the repetitive thing even if the total time spent is equivalent.
People just aren’t learning the power user stuff these days and look at me like I’m a wizard because I can use tools written 40 years ago…
Sounds like I’m glad “home row” style typing fell out of favour. It may be the theoretically fastest way to type eventually, but it seems to lead to pretty rigid behaviour. Adapting to new things as they come along and changing your flow to move with them instead of against them is just a much more comfortable way to live. Even if I only type 80% as fast.
I have no idea what you mean by “fell out of favour”. Does your keyboard not have pips on F and J? People still touch type. Dunno what to tell you.
You’re getting hung up on “home row”. You still have to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back. It’s the same problem, whether or not you know how to type well and stare at your hands, except now you have to add steps for “look at the screen” and “look back at your hands”.
Fell out of favour in that it isn’t taught as “the correct way to type” any more. Largely because most devices you type on now wouldn’t even have physical keys. So learning home row typing for the occasional time the thing you are typing on is a physical full sized keyboard just disrupts the flow of everything else.
Being perfectly optimal isn’t as productive as it feels, especially when it leads to resistance to change and adapt.
Yup. My kids learned how to type properly, and they’re in elementary school. And no, their teachers aren’t boomers, they’re a mix of millennials and gen z.
That’s great. It seems like Gen Z didn’t learn typing. Maybe I’m over generalizing, but my three niblings can’t type for shit. The only things they know about computers are what I’ve taught them and then what they learned outside of school using the computers their mom and I got them.
I hope you taught them how to pirate. ;-) Seriously though, my 20-something associates have absolutely no idea how to, they think it’s some kind of dark art rather than clicking on a link.
That doesn’t mean they weren’t taught, they probably just didn’t practice. My kids (elementary school) play Minecraft, write stories in my computer, and like searching for stuff online (Amazon and YouTube).
That said, we don’t let them use tablets or phones very often, because we don’t want them getting that much screen time. So it could come down to parenting. That said, I’m a software engineer, and I’d teach them if the school didn’t (in fact, I started teaching my first, and stopped because they taught it in school).
What I don’t understand is they teach cursive when that’s quite useless. IMO, they should spend that time on more typing practice and maybe calligraphy (much cooler than cursive).
Hmm, is that a states thing then? Typing courses around here have capitulated on it. You can choose to learn it if max typing speed is the most important factor, but alternate forms of touch typing and muscle memory are fully accepted now. Often times just due to the varying amount of personal practice, the fastest typer in class isn’t even a home row kid.
But way back when I was in school, they constantly tried to force me to switch to home row, despite already having years of practice typing outside of school. I was already a faster typer than the teacher, so they had a hard time convincing me that their way was better. I eventually saw enough data on it to believe it, but I’m still glad I was unconvinced at the time. I still type fast enough to get any typing job, but I’m not so rigid and can use various types of keyboard equally well. Home row is very good at one thing, but it makes you prioritise that one thing too much. If you really wanted to type fast, but be limited to only one set of hardware, stenography is one step more in that direction.
Touch typing is not only home row typing. I do touch type, I just do it in “hunt and peck” style, just without the “hunting” part, and much faster pecking. I feel it’s a much more transferable skill.
And while I don’t practice home row, I do feel that I understand it. And I respect it for it’s purpose, I just think it’s outdated, and incongruent with modern life now. It’s more likely to hold someone back rather than benefit them now.
I get it. I had been messing with computers for years by the time I had a typing class. I was very fast with the method I came up with, and I tried home row. I ended up combining bastardized home row and my homebrew method and got even faster.
Yes, it is taught. If you take a typing course, you will be taught to use home row. What you mean is, you were never taught to type because we don’t teach that in school anymore. If you do most your typing on a touch screen, I have to imagine: you are so young. In 20 years when no one is using a touch screen to enter text anymore (but likely still use physical keyboards), you will remember this conversation, and have some greater insight.
Whether or not you know how to touch type, in any situation where there is a mouse, THERE IS A PHYSICAL KEYBOARD. Not knowing how to touch type just makes the task switching overhead greater.
I’ve used ion, ratpoison, i3, sawfish, and other tiling window managers for fifteen or more years, all totaled up. There is a great deal of pressure to use a modern desktop environment and it’s a lot of work maintaining my janky bespoke desktop environment functions necessary for a few critical applications. I use KDE’s tiling features and keyboard shortcuts, but it’s a double edged sword because I have to disable all window manager bindings in (for example) Blender and emacs to avoid shadowing important features. Actually, I have re-implemented a lot of my custom KDE shortcuts as emacs bindings as well, so they still work when emacs has the focus. Here’s one:
For my wm+Emacs work, I unified the shortcuts by calling a separate go bin that checks if the active window is Emacs or not. If it is, it sends the command to the Emacs Daemon. If it’s not it sends the command to i3. For directional commands like move focus, first check it there’s an Emacs window to that side, if not send the command to i3.
To an extent. Early 90’s I could navigate WordPerfect in DOS faster than I’ve ever been able to work in MS Word, because it was all keyboard even before I learned proper home key 10 finger typing in high school. Technically my first word processor was Wordstar on one of those Osborne “portable” computers with the 5-inch screen when I was a young kid, but Wordperfect was what I did my first real ‘word processing’ on when I started using it for school projects. So I might just be older in that ‘how do you do fellow kids’ in this sort of discussion.
To this day, I still prefer mc (Midnight Commander, linux flavored recreation of Norton Commander that does have a Windows port (YMMV on the win port)) to navigate filesystems for non-automated file management.
I’ve been thoroughly conditioned for mouse use since the mid-late 90s (I call it my Warcraft-Quake era, we still used keyboard only for Doom 1/2 back in the early days), and I feel like it’s a crutch when I’m trying to do productive work instead of gaming. When I spend a few days working using remote shells, I definitely notice a speed increase. Then a few days later I lose it all again when I’m back on that mouse cursor flow brain.
I call it my Warcraft-Quake era, we still used keyboard only for Doom 1/2 back in the early days
This is my main reason for not pining for the days before the mouse: it made gaming 100000x better. I remember when we first started playing quake, a lot of the guys swore by the keyboard only, until I regularly destroyed them with the mouse. . .and they all switched over.
I’ve also done a lot of graphic design, photo-editing, schematic design, etc. . . and can’t imagine having to do that solely with the keyboard (but again, I’m often like “why isn’t there a keyboard shortcut for this?”).
Also, when it comes to productivity, I guess it depends on what you are doing because usually my big hurdle is not how quickly I can do actions (that is usually more important in video games, tbh), the big hurdle is sitting down and thinking about how to do it correctly.
Has the keyboard and mouse versus controller argument finally died? I mean I use a controller for things like Elden Ring and keyboard and mouse for first person or tactics/strategy games.
We proved twenty years ago that keyboard and mouse was better for first person gaming and I was still hearing arguments that controllers were better five years ago.
I have a game controller and a mouse. I don’t use my game controller to code. I don’t use my keyboard to sculpt. The problem isn’t that mice exist at all, its that they are overwhelmingly dominant to the point where most applications do not cater to anything else.
Now I see your original point in a new light. I just viewed it as a natural progression that the mouse would take over as the primary input because of it’s useful and intuitiveness. So when you say you “hated” this, I interpreted as a hate for mice in general and the wishing for pre-mice days. Rather than just a move back towards the keyboard being the primary interface.
Is this for real?
Even for like 20 years after mousing became the primary interface, you could still navigate much faster using keyboard shortcuts / accelerator keys. Application designers no longer consider that feature. Now you are obliged to constantly take your fingers off home position, find the mouse, move it 3cm, aim it carefully, click, and move your hand back to home position, an operation taking a couple of seconds or more, when the equivalent keyboard commands could have been issued in a couple hundred milliseconds.
I love how deeply nerdy Lemmy is. I’m a bit of a nerd but I’m not “mice were a mistake” nerd.
I don’t think mice were a mistake, but they’re worse for most of the tasks I do. I’m a software engineer and I suck at art, so I just need to write, compile, and test code.
There are some things a mouse is way better for:
But for almost everything else, I prefer a keyboard.
And while we’re on a tangent, I hate WASD, why shift my fingers over from the normal home row position? It should be ESDF, which feels way more natural…
I am using ESDF because my “A” key stopped being as responsive, didn’t expect someone to do this on purpose!
It’s just more ergonomic. My hands are already there, why shift them? Oh, and use QAZ instead of Tab, Shift, and Ctrl, they’re right there.
Thanks, I got you beat on ESDF though because i’m a RDFG man, since playing counter strike 1.6. With WASD they usually put crouch or something on ctrl but my pinky has a hard time stretching down there, but on RDFG my pinky has easy access to QW AS ZX, and tab caps and shift with a little stretch. It’s come in handy when playing games with a lot of keybinds.
Pfff, minutes after trying to minimize your nerdiness, you post this confession.
lol
What pisses me off even more is many games bind to the letter instead of physical key position (e.g. key code), so alternative layouts get a big middle finger. I use Dvorak, and I’ve quit fighting and just switch to QWERTY for games.
I don’t have a problem with hitting control (I guess I have big hands), but I totally agree that default key binds largely suck. I wish games came with a handful of popular ones, and bound to key codes so hs Dvorak users (or international users) didn’t have to keep switching to QWERTY.
I always rebind to ESDF if the game doesn’t do stupid things preventing it from being practical. The addition of the 1QAZ strip being available to the pinky is a killer feature all on its own. I typically use that for weapon switching, instead of having to stretch up to 1234 and take my fingers off the movement keys.
Tablets are better than mice at drawing, modelling, and photo editing. Mice are good for first person shooters. Game controllers are better for most other games. You can mouse in
dired-modei guess, if you’re a casual.The problem is they generally use E and F for something, which results in a cascade of rebinding.
And yeah, tablets are better, but they’re also more expensive and don’t do other mice things. For how rarely I do 3D modeling and whatnot (pretty rare), making sure my mouse has a middle button is plenty.
And yeah, I much prefer controller, even for FPS since I don’t play competitively (even then, I’ve seen awesome videos about gyro aiming).
E and F is certainly is a problem, but developing your own custom key map is almost always part of a larger process of becoming more effective anyway. Typically I start by just moving all left-hand bindings right by one key.
I feel like the mouse is a good generalist, jack of all trades input device, but outside of fps, I feel that any task that quote requires unquote a mouse is done better with a tablet. They are of equivalent price, honestly. Mice are not cheap, tablets are not expensive.
Right now I am using voice dictation because it is better than typing on a phone, but oh my God it sucks so bad.
I generally don’t play the same game consistently and rarely spend more than 40 hours (usually 10-15) in a given game. For most of the games I spend more time in, it’s either mouse driven (most strategy games) or I use a controller (most third person/top down games). And for the few I play that use WASD, my kids also play on my computer (e.g. Minecraft).
So I just don’t edit keybindings very often. I actually sometimes avoid playing WASD games because fixing the keys is a pain, especially when some games don’t update the in-game hints or don’t warm when there’s a collision (silently unbinds the key). It’s annoying and I don’t understand why it was ever a thing.
Takes thousands of hours just to git gud! I play for the sense of fluency and control that only comes with extending your sense of body and self into the game world. I play strategy games to relax, but I play my mains to channel the torrents of energy swirling around in my head.
It’s also an age thing. My visual processing is getting worse and worse. My disorientation facing a busy screen with literally thousands of objects that can be interacted with by mouse is a cognitive drain compared to a textual interface where I do most of the work abstractly without having to use visual processing at all. Like reading a book vs watching a movie.
I probably have a lot more experience using pre-mouse era computers than most people. It’s like being asked to start using a different language when you are 20. Yeah, you’ll become perfectly fluent for a couple decades… but you’ll also lose that language first when you get old.
I have noticed that millenials navigate multilayer mouse interfaces (like going down a few chained drop down menus) way faster than I ever did. And zoomers use touch screen keyboards almost as well as I ever touchtyped. Brains are only plastic to a degree, and it just plain feels good to use all those neurons that you first laid down when you were young and your mind was infinite.
That functionality (first necessary, then required by guidelines, then expected, and then still usual) disciplined UI designers to make things doable in a clear sequence of actions.
Now they think any ape can make a UI if it knows the new shiny buzzwords like “material design” or “air” or whatever. And they do! Except humans can’t use those UIs.
BTW, about their “air”. One can look at ancient UI paradigms, specifically SunView, OpenLook and Motif (I’m currently excited about Sun history again), Windows 3.*, and also Win9x (with WinXP being more or less inside the same paradigm). And one can see that of these only Motif had anything resembling their “air”. And Motif is generally considered clunky and less usable than the rest of the mentioned (I personally consider OpenLook the best), but compared to modern UIs even Motif does that “air” part the way it seems to make some sense, and feels less clunky, making me wonder how is that even possible.
FFS, modern UI designers don’t even think it’s necessary to clearly and consistently separate buttons and links from text.
And also - freedom in Web and UI design has proven to be a mistake. UIs should be native. Web browsers should display pages adaptively (we have such and such blocks of text and such and such links), their appearance should be decided on the client and be native too, except pictures. Gemini is the right way to go for the Web.
I feel your pain and irrelevancy with crystalline clarity. The world isn’t interested in doing things the right way, or even in a good way; consumers are too perversely enthralled by capital’s interests. I kind of hate that computers ever became a consumer good.
I just use a mouse to type in stuff using the on screen keyboard. It’s annoying having to take the ball out and clean it, but you get used to it.
I used the logitech optical trackball mouse for quite a few years! Did not play a lot of FPS a that time…
I love trackballs (except that Kensington above. It was basically a pinch your skin torture device.) I still use the Logitech M570 trackball. It’s pretty good.
My favorite of all time though was the Logitech Trackman Vista. Absolutely perfect form factor that Logitech just gave up on one day and I will never know why.
Looks like it’s a finger ball, rather than the thumb ball Logitech usually favours? Middle finger on LMB, ring finger on RMB? Ohhh, THUMB on LMB.
Well the beauty of it was that it was comfortable to use with index finger or thumb. Which was nice when you were doing something precise or wanted to do something that involved a lot of broad movement.
Still use one to control the PC when i’m in bed. =)
US military: “Perfection.”
Hey they made new technology where you can just yell at the computer and it’ll understand 60% of what you’re saying.
Reminds me of the ancient technology where you just kick it until you get a more tractable problem.
I kept every mouse ball I ever obtained and display them in my china cabinet.
When I’m “computering” for efficiency, I don’t take my hands off the keyboard. Half of my job is on a standard keyboard, and so familiarizing myself with all the shortcuts and whatnot saves a lot of time versus having to travel back and forth to a mouse or track pad.
When I am just satisfying the dopamine urges, it’s mouse all the way.
Sure. It’s a lowest common denominator interface. With all that comes with that.
Lowest common denominator interface is definitely touch screen, then maybe game controllers but I love those for some games.
Edit - TV remotes!
Sure, it’s not 100% better in all situations. But when you’re unfamiliar with something, almost universally, it’s far more intuitive.
And this doesn’t even take into account things like gaming. I also can’t imagine trying to do visual design things solely with the computer. Like any type of drawing or schematic design.
Being pretty adept at using the keyboard, I’m often frustrated when I find out that the only way to do something is by mouse when there appears that there should be an easy way to do it by keyboard. But, man, I can’t imagine longing for the days before the mouse.
Yes, the mouse is useful in many situations (esp 3d modeling), so I don’t think anyone is arguing that it shouldn’t exist.
The problem, however, is that we’ve standardized on it for everything, to the point where software often ignores a better KB-driven workflow because the mouse one is good enough. “When all you have is a hammer…”
We’ve prioritized “intuitive” over “efficient.” There’s nothing wrong with learning to properly use a tool, and it’s sad that we don’t expect users to put in that modicum of effort. In the 80s and 90s, that’s just how things were, you either learn the tools (often with a handbook) or you don’t use them. The net result was a populace that didn’t need support as much, because they were used to reading the docs. If a component died, the docs would tell you how to diagnose and fix it. These days, those docs just don’t exist, so if the solution isn’t intuitive, you replace it (both hardware and software).
That’s where this frustration comes from. Making things intuitive also means reducing the average person’s understanding of their tools, and the mouse is a symptom of that shift.
I would argue, overall, it’s more efficient to aim for the former than the latter, especially if we are talking about the wide range of people who need to use a computer.
But I’m curious as to the “actions per minute” type of efficiency that people are talking about here. I’m an engineer, who has moved into computer programming. I would say the bottleneck for me is never that I have to move my hand to my mouse, but it’s always about thinking and planning. I feel like this “it’s so much more efficient” is viewing us as almost machines that are just trying to output actions, rather than think through and solve problems.
I think this is more of a problem that it went from an extremely niche thing, to something that almost everyone is required to use, rather than a move away from keyboard only. Or, maybe, the rise of the mouse opened the computer to everyone being able to use it, which is why it has become so ubiquitous.
To me it’s more about ergonomics. Most of my time is spent reading code and sending messages. I use ViM or at least ViM bindings for reading code because it’s so much nicer for navigating code than clicking and scrolling:
queryI’m not saying everyone should learn ViM, I’m just using it as an example. I’m much less concerned about maximizing my text entry speed and more interested in maximizing ergonomics of the tools I use the most every day. For me that’s my text editor and terminal, followed closely by my browser.
I have no problem with a good mouse UI (I love mouse mode in ViM), my problem is when there isn’t an alternative power user UX (shortcuts and whatnot).
This extends to a ton of things. Let’s say you want to search for a file, but the GUI indexed search isn’t working properly (maybe it didn’t index your file? Or maybe you need more than string contains?). If you’re comfortable on the CLI and understand regex, you’re set. Or maybe you need to do some bulk change across files, the CLI is going to be really efficient. It’s less about total productivity but not having to do stupid repetitive tasks because that’s my only option. I’d much rather write a script than do the repetitive thing even if the total time spent is equivalent.
People just aren’t learning the power user stuff these days and look at me like I’m a wizard because I can use tools written 40 years ago…
I feel that.
Sounds like I’m glad “home row” style typing fell out of favour. It may be the theoretically fastest way to type eventually, but it seems to lead to pretty rigid behaviour. Adapting to new things as they come along and changing your flow to move with them instead of against them is just a much more comfortable way to live. Even if I only type 80% as fast.
I have no idea what you mean by “fell out of favour”. Does your keyboard not have pips on F and J? People still touch type. Dunno what to tell you.
You’re getting hung up on “home row”. You still have to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back. It’s the same problem, whether or not you know how to type well and stare at your hands, except now you have to add steps for “look at the screen” and “look back at your hands”.
Fell out of favour in that it isn’t taught as “the correct way to type” any more. Largely because most devices you type on now wouldn’t even have physical keys. So learning home row typing for the occasional time the thing you are typing on is a physical full sized keyboard just disrupts the flow of everything else.
Being perfectly optimal isn’t as productive as it feels, especially when it leads to resistance to change and adapt.
Home row is absolutely still taught as the “correct” way to type. Source: kids are in elementary school
Yup. My kids learned how to type properly, and they’re in elementary school. And no, their teachers aren’t boomers, they’re a mix of millennials and gen z.
That’s great. It seems like Gen Z didn’t learn typing. Maybe I’m over generalizing, but my three niblings can’t type for shit. The only things they know about computers are what I’ve taught them and then what they learned outside of school using the computers their mom and I got them.
I hope you taught them how to pirate. ;-) Seriously though, my 20-something associates have absolutely no idea how to, they think it’s some kind of dark art rather than clicking on a link.
That doesn’t mean they weren’t taught, they probably just didn’t practice. My kids (elementary school) play Minecraft, write stories in my computer, and like searching for stuff online (Amazon and YouTube).
That said, we don’t let them use tablets or phones very often, because we don’t want them getting that much screen time. So it could come down to parenting. That said, I’m a software engineer, and I’d teach them if the school didn’t (in fact, I started teaching my first, and stopped because they taught it in school).
What I don’t understand is they teach cursive when that’s quite useless. IMO, they should spend that time on more typing practice and maybe calligraphy (much cooler than cursive).
Hmm, is that a states thing then? Typing courses around here have capitulated on it. You can choose to learn it if max typing speed is the most important factor, but alternate forms of touch typing and muscle memory are fully accepted now. Often times just due to the varying amount of personal practice, the fastest typer in class isn’t even a home row kid.
But way back when I was in school, they constantly tried to force me to switch to home row, despite already having years of practice typing outside of school. I was already a faster typer than the teacher, so they had a hard time convincing me that their way was better. I eventually saw enough data on it to believe it, but I’m still glad I was unconvinced at the time. I still type fast enough to get any typing job, but I’m not so rigid and can use various types of keyboard equally well. Home row is very good at one thing, but it makes you prioritise that one thing too much. If you really wanted to type fast, but be limited to only one set of hardware, stenography is one step more in that direction.
fascinating take on touch typing from someone who doesn’t practice, understand, or respect it
Touch typing is not only home row typing. I do touch type, I just do it in “hunt and peck” style, just without the “hunting” part, and much faster pecking. I feel it’s a much more transferable skill.
And while I don’t practice home row, I do feel that I understand it. And I respect it for it’s purpose, I just think it’s outdated, and incongruent with modern life now. It’s more likely to hold someone back rather than benefit them now.
I get it. I had been messing with computers for years by the time I had a typing class. I was very fast with the method I came up with, and I tried home row. I ended up combining bastardized home row and my homebrew method and got even faster.
Yes, it is taught. If you take a typing course, you will be taught to use home row. What you mean is, you were never taught to type because we don’t teach that in school anymore. If you do most your typing on a touch screen, I have to imagine: you are so young. In 20 years when no one is using a touch screen to enter text anymore (but likely still use physical keyboards), you will remember this conversation, and have some greater insight.
Whether or not you know how to touch type, in any situation where there is a mouse, THERE IS A PHYSICAL KEYBOARD. Not knowing how to touch type just makes the task switching overhead greater.
My kids were taught in elementary school in like 1st grade, largely because using laptops (Chromebooks) is part of the curriculum.
So I see you clearly haven’t heard of i3, sway or hyperland …
I’ve used ion, ratpoison, i3, sawfish, and other tiling window managers for fifteen or more years, all totaled up. There is a great deal of pressure to use a modern desktop environment and it’s a lot of work maintaining my janky bespoke desktop environment functions necessary for a few critical applications. I use KDE’s tiling features and keyboard shortcuts, but it’s a double edged sword because I have to disable all window manager bindings in (for example) Blender and
emacsto avoid shadowing important features. Actually, I have re-implemented a lot of my custom KDE shortcuts as emacs bindings as well, so they still work when emacs has the focus. Here’s one:(cl-flet ((switch-to (name) (lambda () (interactive) (shell-command (concat "wmctrl -a " name))))) (global-set-key (kbd "s-1") (switch-to "librewolf")) (global-set-key (kbd "s-2") (switch-to "konsole")) (global-set-key (kbd "s-3") (switch-to "signal")) (global-set-key (kbd "s-4") (switch-to "darktable")) (global-set-key (kbd "s-5") (switch-to "emacs")))For my wm+Emacs work, I unified the shortcuts by calling a separate go bin that checks if the active window is Emacs or not. If it is, it sends the command to the Emacs Daemon. If it’s not it sends the command to i3. For directional commands like move focus, first check it there’s an Emacs window to that side, if not send the command to i3.
The things we have to go through just to meet basic needs.
How are you redirecting all input through your custom exec? Is that an i3 feature?
why have I made that anonymous function
interactive??Edit: Oh I think anything you bind to a key has to be
interactive.To an extent. Early 90’s I could navigate WordPerfect in DOS faster than I’ve ever been able to work in MS Word, because it was all keyboard even before I learned proper home key 10 finger typing in high school. Technically my first word processor was Wordstar on one of those Osborne “portable” computers with the 5-inch screen when I was a young kid, but Wordperfect was what I did my first real ‘word processing’ on when I started using it for school projects. So I might just be older in that ‘how do you do fellow kids’ in this sort of discussion.
To this day, I still prefer mc (Midnight Commander, linux flavored recreation of Norton Commander that does have a Windows port (YMMV on the win port)) to navigate filesystems for non-automated file management.
I’ve been thoroughly conditioned for mouse use since the mid-late 90s (I call it my Warcraft-Quake era, we still used keyboard only for Doom 1/2 back in the early days), and I feel like it’s a crutch when I’m trying to do productive work instead of gaming. When I spend a few days working using remote shells, I definitely notice a speed increase. Then a few days later I lose it all again when I’m back on that mouse cursor flow brain.
Early ’90s*
You got it right the second time though, champ!
This is my main reason for not pining for the days before the mouse: it made gaming 100000x better. I remember when we first started playing quake, a lot of the guys swore by the keyboard only, until I regularly destroyed them with the mouse. . .and they all switched over.
I’ve also done a lot of graphic design, photo-editing, schematic design, etc. . . and can’t imagine having to do that solely with the keyboard (but again, I’m often like “why isn’t there a keyboard shortcut for this?”).
Also, when it comes to productivity, I guess it depends on what you are doing because usually my big hurdle is not how quickly I can do actions (that is usually more important in video games, tbh), the big hurdle is sitting down and thinking about how to do it correctly.
Has the keyboard and mouse versus controller argument finally died? I mean I use a controller for things like Elden Ring and keyboard and mouse for first person or tactics/strategy games.
We proved twenty years ago that keyboard and mouse was better for first person gaming and I was still hearing arguments that controllers were better five years ago.
I have a game controller and a mouse. I don’t use my game controller to code. I don’t use my keyboard to sculpt. The problem isn’t that mice exist at all, its that they are overwhelmingly dominant to the point where most applications do not cater to anything else.
Now I see your original point in a new light. I just viewed it as a natural progression that the mouse would take over as the primary input because of it’s useful and intuitiveness. So when you say you “hated” this, I interpreted as a hate for mice in general and the wishing for pre-mice days. Rather than just a move back towards the keyboard being the primary interface.