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Show HN: Nomouse

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Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#151

Post by khedoros1 »

H4CK3RM4N wrote: post #84
inetknght wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud you, good sir. I've used Mac OS (classic) since a child, Windows since a teenager, and OS X sometimes at certain jobs. My most recent job rather forced me to use Linux... and now I find myself wishing for less and less GUI and more and more TUI. Command lines really are far more intuitive to me than any GUI has been; my workflow in a software terminal is far more productive than any GUI application has ever…

Just fyi, it's CLI not TUI. Also, I find macOS generally seems to be pretty good for keyboard-based navigation(especially with BetterTouchTool).

CLI: Command-Line Interface, TUI: Text User Interface. I'd think that CLI is a subset of TUI.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#152

Post by mst »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #148
mst wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[This is a reply to the 'edited heavily' version, I didn't see the original]

> I question your motivation in doing so.

The users in question wanted to get into the habit of using hjkl because you can do things like 23j more easily with them. My motivation was to help them do so.

My suggestion helped them achieve that, and once it had, they removed the config lines again. And thanked me for the help.

> 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.

I agree that there's no One True Way. Which is why your a-priori assumption that this couldn't possibly help people when I already know it can seems strange to me; I'm sure it wouldn't help everybody, but the specific people I picked got on fine with it.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#153

Post by btschaegg »

watwut wrote: post #134
btschaegg wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, if the only thing you're doing is actual navigation. As soon as you want to also edit said code, you loose said benefit since you're constantly switching between mouse and keyboard. Als, if you do other actions than "goto definition", you'll also lose that speed very fast. In VS, "find occurrences" is burried somewhere in a rather convoluted context menu, while I can perform the according hotkey (C-k C-r) in…

I either edit or navigate and switch between the two rarely enough. Obviously I don't type with keyboard. In eclipse you right click the function and the "show callers" is right there. Along with keyboard shortcut so I have the chance to learn it. Along with all other options so I see them and can learn them too. It is not as if keyboard shortcuts were mutually exclusive with using mouse - unless someone decided that…

> It is not as if keyboard shortcuts were mutually exclusive with using mouse

Of course, nobody said that. The mouse is one of the best user interface devices that has been designed for computing. Just not for working with text.

Now nobody condemns you if you like to use the mouse for browsing your code. However, if I'm right in reading your comment as rather snippy (hard to tell on the internet ;-) ), you seem to be very ready to do that to everyone seeing the merit in getting more proficient with their keyboard...

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#154

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

mst wrote: post #152
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

[This is a reply to the 'edited heavily' version, I didn't see the original] > I question your motivation in doing so. The users in question wanted to get into the habit of using hjkl because you can do things like 23j more easily with them. My motivation was to help them do so. My suggestion helped them achieve that, and once it had, they removed the config lines again. And thanked me for the help. > There is no One…

Fair point- if it worked for them, it worked for them. I just thought it sounded a bit sadistic, that's all.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#155

Post by mst »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #154
mst wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[This is a reply to the 'edited heavily' version, I didn't see the original] > I question your motivation in doing so. The users in question wanted to get into the habit of using hjkl because you can do things like 23j more easily with them. My motivation was to help them do so. My suggestion helped them achieve that, and once it had, they removed the config lines again. And thanked me for the help. > There is no One…

Fair point- if it worked for them, it worked for them. I just thought it sounded a bit sadistic, that's all.

For some people it would definitely be sadism. I don't try and convince people I believe that would be true for to try it.

OTOH, watching a partner of mine play with movement commands after they'd internalised hjkl and spending the next half hour navigating around a document while giggling and grinning at me ... definitely demostrates that isn't universal.

I am, honestly, struggling to be polite after you called me making somebody I was in love with happy actively harmful and called my motivations into question rather than considering that there might me more than one way to learn it, but OTOH you're clearly acting in good faith so I hold no animus towards you for your mistake.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#156

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

mst wrote: post #155
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point- if it worked for them, it worked for them. I just thought it sounded a bit sadistic, that's all.

For some people it would definitely be sadism. I don't try and convince people I believe that would be true for to try it. OTOH, watching a partner of mine play with movement commands after they'd internalised hjkl and spending the next half hour navigating around a document while giggling and grinning at me ... definitely demostrates that isn't universal. I am, honestly, struggling to be polite after you called me m…

I am not struggling at all to be polite. There's rarely good reason to be impolite.

I meant actively harmful towards vim's reputation as a useful editor, not to the person you're in love with, whom of course I have not been acquainted with.

Your original comment gave me little context to judge your motivation other than "I told some people to disable their arrow keys". Which I find unnecessary, so I questioned your motivation: literally, I could not understand why you did that.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#157

Post by chipotle_coyote »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #133
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…

> 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 circumstance.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#158

Post by chipotle_coyote »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #121
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 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 hard…

I appreciate the lesson, but that wasn't a curly brace command. What I said was typing "3/{", which seems like it's what you're suggesting: "/" to search for the "{" brace, but prefixed with "3" to jump to the third brace, which matches my example. You could do that with "/{" and two "n" keystrokes, but hey, that's one more keystroke.

I suppose I'm not a Vim superstar, but I've been using it since before the 6.0 release, and still use it today. You're right that it's not the only editor that I use, but it turns out that even if you can't be very good at every editor, when you've been using computers for nearly four decades you can be reasonably good at two or three.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#159

Post by bartvk »

skaplun wrote: post #89

Shower thought.. what about a keyboard with an application launcher inside it?

You mean just for launching apps? Basically I think there's nothing faster than Spotlight; Cmd-Space, then type the first one or two letters of the application name and hit Enter.

Re: Show HN: Nomouse

#160

Post by netzone »

atnnn wrote: post #117
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…

Using a mouse is distracting. It steals our focus away. Programming can seem like a slow process because the bulk of the process happens in our minds. Keeping our focus on our precious mental models makes us more productive. Keyboard shortcuts become mechanical. When we're in the middle of editing code, whether we type "F8" "C-c C-l" or ":make", we can keep your focus where it belongs. But if we use a mouse to click…

See, for me it's the complete opposite, typing words unrelated to the actual code makes me lose part of my focus, whereas navigating the mouse or a dropdown list isn't requiring me to "create" words or strings in my mind.

Maybe that's just because I haven't gone through the learning curve, but I suspect the difference would be negligible.

[Edit] That's only for keybindings that force me to input string though, I vigorously use keybindings.

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