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Show HN: Nomouse

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Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#161

Post by quicknir »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #92
WesleyJohnson wrote: post #35

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 use vim style bindings but agree that vimmers tend to exaggerate about the benefits. I think it works fine and so does a mouse and it's a small impact in the grand scheme.

However, with regards to your example, things like easy motion/avy solve this exact problem, I think no slower than a mouse. You basically punch in one, two, or more characters at the place you want to jump (depending which package/command you call), and then every match on the screen is highlighted and replaced with a different letter. Then you press that letter and jump there.

Not arguing that's it's much better, just that's approximately the same. Check it out: https://github.com/abo-abo/avy.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#162

Post by JupiterMoon »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #157
JupiterMoon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vim and Emacs style movement commands are faster than the mouse in certain contexts, but I'm dubious that's universally true. "I want to jump to line 123" is easy, but what about "I want to move the cursor to the open brace character right there"? No matter how much of a seasoned pro you may be, you're going to have to think for a moment about how to do to that: "let me count the '{' characters between the current…

I'm not positive that's going to be faster in every than using the mouse, though, still. And selecting lines with a mouse is, in most editors, triple-click and drag. I'm not saying that's necessarily faster than using visual mode--just that, again, it's not necessarily slower. It seems to me that cognitively they're fairly similar, and it doesn't feel to me like using the keyboard is conclusively faster in this circu…

It comes down to personal preference and makes only minuscule differences in the grand scheme of a job that is mainly thinking not typing.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#163

Post by chipotle_coyote »

quicknir wrote: post #161
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use vim style bindings but agree that vimmers tend to exaggerate about the benefits. I think it works fine and so does a mouse and it's a small impact in the grand scheme. However, with regards to your example, things like easy motion/avy solve this exact problem, I think no slower than a mouse. You basically punch in one, two, or more characters at the place you want to jump (depending which package/command you ca…

I'd forgotten about easymotion -- I remember installing it years ago and taking it back out because it seemed so alien, but it's very clever, and I definitely believe that in practice it'd be fast, too.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#164

Post by chipotle_coyote »

microcolonel wrote: post #136
lathiat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MacBook Pro setup is faster again because I can use the mouse with my thumb without getting off the keyboard (and the trackpad works very well). Even with the trackpad I use on my desktop I have to move my hands backs and forward.

Have you ever tried a trackpoint? It seems like it'd be right up your alley.

While I'm not the person you're replying to, I always felt like I should have liked the trackpoint more than I did. I could never manage very precise movements with it -- and I learned that if you flail around with a pointing device, it's definitely slower than a keyboard, even if it's built into the keyboard. :)

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#165

Post by chipotle_coyote »

molloy wrote: post #150
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Someone else mentioned avy above, too. I should definitely give it a look.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#166

Post by sdflkd »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #92
WesleyJohnson wrote: post #35

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…

https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion

This plugin solves the curly brace issue. I find if there is something you find repeatedly annoying, there is probably a plugin to solve it. That or you suddenly have an interesting side project!

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#167

Post by orionblastar »

redsummer wrote: post #130
orionblastar wrote: post #90

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.

I think the whole magazine is here: https://ia801307.us.archive.org/16/items/mac_MacWorld_9011_N...

That is the PDF version.

https://archive.org/details/mac_MacWorld_9011_November_1990

Page 69 is where it starts, IIRC.

It was very contralesional when it came out, The PC had DOS and the Mac had the GUI before Windows 3.X got very popular.

The irony now is that everyone uses a GUI, is it just the Mac GUI that makes people stupid or is it every GUI out there?

I'm trying to teach friends and family members to fill out forms online. While it is very easy for me, for them it is not so easy. If they want a job, they have to fill out forms on a website.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#168

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

microcolonel wrote: post #138
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Do I need a compositor for the keynav grid to show up? I've tried prettymuch all the versions off the AUR and none of them show anything.

Strange. I don't think I have a compositor running (i3 wm, not much graphical fluff). Would you mind trying https://github.com/yjftsjthsd-g/keynav and if that doesn't work open an issue? (That's "my" fork, albeit with basically no code from me; I discovered that a number of folks were running separate forks and built a version merging as many as I reasonably could. I think one of them changes the way it renders onscreen and so may have better luck.)

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#169

Post by israrkhan »

hossbeast wrote: post #18
israrkhan wrote: post #10

My solution is not to connect a monitor to my dev-machine and use ssh/tmux to do most things. It also makes work-from-home easy, as I can loginto my devbox from anywhere. But then it depends on what type of work you are doing, and how you are testing it.

Do you use a browser (and presumably a mouse) for email, or are you doing that in the console with mutt or pine?

I normally do not use email on my dev machine (use client machine for that). However occasionally I need to run a browser, or GUI app on devbox. I do it via X11. If I am on Windows, I use MobaXterm, which has builtin X11 server. From my macbook, i need to run a seperate x server.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#170

Post by israrkhan »

tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #132
wyager wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people I know just use text editors, no IDEs at all. Modern text editors, whether text-only (vim, emacs) or graphical (Atom, sublime) have plugins to replicate whatever IDE functionality you want anyway.

I should have worded my question better. I wanted to know whether he works directly on the dev server over a terminal or only connects to it and uses programs (IDEs, text editors) on the client machine to work on the code.

I usually work on a fairly large project (think of building a complete OS for embedded devices). IDE cannot handle that. My editor of choice is vim, combined with ctags, and some custom plugins. Sometimes when starting a new project from scratch, or writing a new tool, I use sublime (or vscode). I have smb server running on my dev-machine, and can use sublime on client machine.
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