Glue a push pin on each mouse button, pointy side up.
Cheap, very fast learning guaranteed.
Show HN: Nomouse
141–150 of 173 posts
Re: Show HN: Nomouse
#142I'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 think it's one of these dogma that just get around by word-of-mouth.
Personally, I need the slight downtime of using a mouse when compiling a program, a short moment to pause and clear my head. Without a mouse I'd probably be less productive.
Re: Show HN: Nomouse
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is the sort of thing the mouse is actually rather good for. Though you're probably better using Ctrl+B to embolden than you are the toolbar or menu.
It sounds like roughly the best case for the mouse and roughly the worst case for the keyboard.
Re: Show HN: Nomouse
#144I 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…
> I just found myself in situations where either there was no mouse, or it was more convenient to use the keyboard.
So it's better to just unplug the mouse then? :)
Re: Show HN: Nomouse
#145I 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…
Anecdotal counterexample: I wanted to learn to use Emacs' keyboard shortcuts for moving the point rather than the arrow keys or page-up / page-down. Leaving aside the question of how useful such a practice is, I only managed to reach my goal once I turned off the arrow keys in Emacs, so that I was forced to "the right thing". I would argue that it wasn't so silly to do this for my personal use, I'm quite happy with t…
Similarly, I've found that getting people to learn how to use vim's movement keys is much easier once I persuade them to add
inoremap
inoremap
inoremap
inoremap
Re: Show HN: Nomouse
#146I'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…
It's not just that using the mouse is slow. The mouse is also dumb. By that I mean that you can't tell it to take intelligent actions like jump to/select/delete a particular semantic unit (e.g. a sentence). Using the keyboard allows for more intelligent actions and for composition of actions with (optionally) mnemonic keybindings. The mouse is far less precise and requires some UI for pretty much anything. Besides, e…
I forget which program it is, but I've seen at least one document editor where one click places the cursor where you clicked, a second selects the sentence it's within, and a third expands the selection to the whole paragraph.
Combine that and modifier keys, and it's completely possible to have the mouse involved in intelligent actions, just not nearly as widely implemented as one might hope.
Re: Show HN: Nomouse
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just that using the mouse is slow. The mouse is also dumb. By that I mean that you can't tell it to take intelligent actions like jump to/select/delete a particular semantic unit (e.g. a sentence). Using the keyboard allows for more intelligent actions and for composition of actions with (optionally) mnemonic keybindings. The mouse is far less precise and requires some UI for pretty much anything. Besides, e…
I forget which program it is, but I've seen at least one document editor where one click places the cursor where you clicked, a second selects the sentence it's within, and a third expands the selection to the whole paragraph. Combine that and modifier keys, and it's completely possible to have the mouse involved in intelligent actions, just not nearly as widely implemented as one might hope.
How about firefox? I double click to select a word and triple click to select a paragraph.
Re: Show HN: Nomouse
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotal counterexample: I wanted to learn to use Emacs' keyboard shortcuts for moving the point rather than the arrow keys or page-up / page-down. Leaving aside the question of how useful such a practice is, I only managed to reach my goal once I turned off the arrow keys in Emacs, so that I was forced to "the right thing". I would argue that it wasn't so silly to do this for my personal use, I'm quite happy with t…
Similarly, I've found that getting people to learn how to use vim's movement keys is much easier once I persuade them to add inoremap inoremap inoremap inoremap to their .vimrc
[Edited heavily from initial comment]
That's not just pointless, that's actively harmful. The only thing you achieve in this way is to make it harder for people to see any benefit in learning to use vim, and I question your motivation in doing so.
Vim is useful because it lets you achieve a lot with minimal effort. That it takes some time to learn to use it well is an inevitable side effect of the breadth of control it gives you, and not something to be celebrated in its own right.
There is no One True Way. If you can put that in a shortcut, I strongly urge you to do it, and use it ten times a day until it really sinks in.
Re: Show HN: Nomouse
#149I live in the terminal (and the browser), I use the command line, vim in the terminal. I don't like vimperator, but I do use the VimFX addon for simple jk control of scrolling. And I use the awesomewm tiling window manager.
Some people, when hearing or seeing that, assume that I don't like to use a mouse.
I love my mouse, and it's sitting right there on the couch cushion next to me. Some things, like cut/paste between tmux windows, or between terminal and browser, are just easier with a mouse.
I do try to minimize how much I have to use a mouse, but I use whatever my hand is closest to. Sometimes I scroll the browser with the keyboard, sometimes with the mouse.
I attach zero pride to my use or non-use of the mouse.
Re: Show HN: Nomouse
#150I'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…
> but what about "I want to move the cursor to the open brace character right there"?
Check out avy-goto-char! In my setup, ` j j {` and then one or two homerow keys would move the cursor there. And the rest of the avy functions are useful as well: https://github.com/abo-abo/avy/blob/master/README.md
There are other options too that can be situationally more efficient, but avy-goto-char is faster than reaching for your mouse (at least anecdotally) and you don't have to think about.