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Show HN: Nomouse

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121–130 of 173 posts

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#121

I've never understood the sentiment that using a mouse is bad. I see blog posts all the time about how a programmer's job is more thinking than writing code and/or writing good programs is also about taking out just as much code as you put in. So if writing programs is a deliberate and methodical process that - I'd argue it's also slow. Why then is there antithesis that mice slow you down and you need keyboard shortc…

I suspect a lot more of it is perception than people imagine: keeping your hands on the keyboard all the time seems like it intuitively must be faster. Early research in human-computer interfaces suggests that this isn't actually the case, though. From 1989: "We've done a cool $50 million of R&D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: (1) Test subjects consistently report…

I think I avoid using the mouse with vim. It's not about the mouse per se, it's about having to frequently switch back and forth that becomes frustrating.

I think that you have not learned to move around efficiently in vim. I would never enter that curly-brace command. I think most of my moving is with w, which jumps one word at a time. I also use / to search and page up and down. It sounds like you may be using harder commands than I do.

Becoming efficient with vim takes a little effort and practice, and you seem to have not committed to one single editor. You can't expect to be very good at every editor at the same time.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#122

I've never understood the sentiment that using a mouse is bad. I see blog posts all the time about how a programmer's job is more thinking than writing code and/or writing good programs is also about taking out just as much code as you put in. So if writing programs is a deliberate and methodical process that - I'd argue it's also slow. Why then is there antithesis that mice slow you down and you need keyboard shortc…

The mouse is good for browsing and uncommon actions through drop down menus. There are about 30-40 keybindings I use in emacs, which are the most primitive or the most frequented commands. The rest I find through the drop down menu.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#123
I find this completely pointless. You wean yourself off the mouse when you have to use the keyboard for most of the work you do. Trying to trick yourself to do "the right thing" (if that's what this is about) is just silly.

I use the keyboard almost exclusively, and even had colleagues remark on it rather impressed about it I guess (I don't mind the hacker cred, let's be honest here). I never had to force myself, or try silly tricks to drop a habit. I just found myself in situations where either there was no mouse, or it was more convenient to use the keyboard.

First I was forced to use runlevel 3 only, for three months (gpu died and I didn't have any money). Then I had a long commute with only a wimpy netbook with Fedora ...14, I think? With Xmonad on it (because it's damn light). Then I had a job that was done best over a network with powershell and windows remote. Then I had to do a lot of text processing and it was best done using Vim [1]. Then I spent a year on Z/Os where you can use a mouse but the point-and-shoot fields are much more convenient most of the time (except for copy/pasting, strangely). Then I noticed the Windows' 10 tiling desktop manager and there was much rejoicement (it's gotta be a deliberate Xmonad ripoff!). And now of course Windows has a bash shell so there's never any reason to leave the command line. Yay!

On the other hand, it's true that prolongued mouse use hurts my wrist and I am a bit worried that I might get RSI in the long run, so I'm conciously keeping my keyboard habbit fed. I guess what I'm saying is that the main thing you need is a good reason to drop the mouse, rather than a silly carrot-and-stick approach.

________________

[1] There I did force the issue a bit. I could have used Notepad++ but I was impressed with how a colleague was using vim and I wanted to use it too, so I resolved to make it my main text editor. Then again that's just more of the same: to learn vim I used vim in my everyday work.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#124
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it does indeed. Would love to see a solution for reliably starting that thing at system startup. Also, would be nice to be able to pause it for a period of time.

Launchd is your friend here. Good tutorial: http://www.launchd.info/

Thank you, stranger!

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#125
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like the issue is the text-browser aspect, not the no-javascript aspect, there's no text displayed in the upvote anchor:

I constructed a proper URL and submitted an upvote. upvote " rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=13847301&how=up&auth=f4...

How long did that take you? For me it was about 0.2 seconds with touchpad technology.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would stop citing that old AskTOG article. The $50 million (in 1989) research figure sounds impressive, but they don't say how much of that was keyboard-vs-mouse research and the answer is quite likely "very little". It seems that, like most UX research, they were testing how well novices manage rather than how well people do after weeks of experience (the latter is expensive to test!). When you get to…

I don't understand what task the users were doing when the mouse was discovered to be faster. The keyboard and mouse are not generally interchangeable; the task will generally favor one or the other. I'm assuming that the users were doing something like manipulating a GUI that favored the mouse and was awkward with the keyboard. The purpose of the study was probably to convince people to buy Apple's new mouse-centric…

As far as I remember, in the one study that got reported users were asked to select a number of words scattered through a document and make them bold.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#127
post #5

Have you found any parts of the OS or your workflow that are really hard without the mouse? I can do keyboard in terminal and text editors, but browsers are so so and Windows RDP is where it all fails the worst for me...

I cheat :) On GNU/Linux (well, X11) I use keynav, a nice little utility that lets you drive the cursor by keyboard. It's often a little clunkier than actual mouse, but you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard and it covers the "I only need to click that one button that somehow isn't possible to hit from the keyboard."

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#128
Forcing yourself to this approach seems kinda sucking all the fun out of it. I am "fluent" with many hotkeys and love Vim but sometimes I prefer just clicking around...

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#129
post #16

After I discovered extensions/addons for vim-like control of browsers few years ago, I've completely changed how I browse the web. I rarely even use the mouse anymore. Only when I want to save an image or save a file (from a misconfigured server that doesn't auto-download) do I still use a mouse. For everything else, you simply don't need a mouse at all. My favorites: vimari - Safari port of vimium: https://guyht.git…

I wish there was something like Vimium for Windows 10. I am trying to use hotkeys whenever I can, but some applications are expecting you to use mouse. In such situations I would give gold to be able to quickly select and click elements on screen by keyboard.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#130

I have worked in IT a long time. I learned during the 1980s as a teenager with a Commodore 64 at home and Apple 2 and IBM PCs at high school. This was before the GUI. Everything was text based and shortcut keys. I remember people claiming that the GUI makes people lazy and dumber. There was an article called "Does the Mac make you stupid?" At the time were they split an English class in two and half used a Mac and th…

If anyone could find the original Levy article, I would be interested. GUIs create a sort of 'Learned helplessness', where people are deliberately handicapped in their knowledge. It's as if you never learnt to read, and relied on an app which reads text with a speech synthesiser.
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