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Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

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Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#91

Post by imiric »

whatever1 wrote: post #23
blunte wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who can type very quickly, every movement of the hand away from the keyboard (to the mouse) and back has a high cost in terms of lost typing opportunity. If speed and subconscious operation are the goal, then it's best to stick to as much keyboard only as possible, or alternately to learn to maximize the one hand keyboard + mouse approach (which can actually be very fast once you know your tools).

For most of us mortals, typing is not the bottleneck when we are writing code, an article or whatever. In any case, keyboard-only interfaces make the assumption that you know all of the shortcuts for each program you use. And boy they are inconsistent. They also offer zero discoverability for someone that did not read the manual (see the vim jokes). I like software that offers both good pointer UI + robust keyboard s…

> keyboard-only interfaces make the assumption that you know all of the shortcuts for each program you use

That's why you carefully choose programs that are highly configurable so that you can integrate them seamlessly into your particular workflow.

The reason I use Emacs is not because it's a great editor. It's slow, often frustrating and since adding LSP support it crashes frequently. The reason I stick to it is because it gives me endless customization so that I can decide how I want it to work, instead of the author or some company deciding that for me. Learning to use it is therefore an investment in future time saving since I won't have to worry about it drastically changing or moving to another system if the company that supports it decides to change direction.

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#92

Post by thanato0s »

torben-friis wrote: post #24
hartator wrote: post #13

I never got the hate of mouse in the dev community. Isn’t most of work browsing code and Googling things? Making a mouse a way to navigate way more efficient than a keyboard? It seems retrograde.

I'm somewhat skeptic regarding pro tools that take a lifetime to master (never got to like emacs for example, and I like MacOS dar more than customizing a Linux distro) but there are some mouseless skills that are such a game changer for me I almost can't use a pc without them, everything else becomes too frustrating. Vimium to browse the web is a Godsend for example. No need to learn for weeks, it's: -j/k for scroll…

These tools take a lifetime to master, that's true; but I could code in Neovim in two weeks. I think if you decide seriously to learn it, you can be effective with it pretty fast.

Easy to learn, hard to master. That's what I like, because you never stop learning.

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#93

Post by thanato0s »

ska wrote: post #30
hartator wrote: post #13

I never got the hate of mouse in the dev community. Isn’t most of work browsing code and Googling things? Making a mouse a way to navigate way more efficient than a keyboard? It seems retrograde.

The thing about a mouse interface is that it's a lowest-common-denominator approach for a lot of things that works pretty ok. Certainly better for that than the text-only interfaces it's largely replaces. This is also why the web is so married to it, 'cause you can navigate around a bunch of semi-consistent information. The average confused user will probably do better randomly mousing around than trying to juggle ke…

I agree with most of what you're saying. Now, about the skills of the users, I think people are smart and can learn more easily than we think, if and only if they're taught right.

It's what I tried to do. I don't know if I succeeded, but so far I had only positive return, so it's encouraging :)

About the mix of both: I agree if I'm a long period on my keyboard or on my mouse, but not interleaving the use of both.

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#94

Post by thanato0s »

blunte wrote: post #26
whatever1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most of us mortals, typing is not the bottleneck when we are writing code, an article or whatever. In any case, keyboard-only interfaces make the assumption that you know all of the shortcuts for each program you use. And boy they are inconsistent. They also offer zero discoverability for someone that did not read the manual (see the vim jokes). I like software that offers both good pointer UI + robust keyboard s…

We're all mortals :). Like other endeavors of growth, a good approach is to regularly make a small effort to learn a little more about something (like your tools, which includes keyboard shortcuts). As one simple example, if you have a URL somewhere and you want to quickly open it in a new window, you just use the keyboard shortcuts to copy (which hopefully everyone knows), switch to browser (alt-tab or cmd-tab or ev…

The problem is not necessarily to be fast for me (I know people who are very fast with the combo mouse / keyboard) but more if you like it. If you don't enjoy working with your tools, you'll have a lot of friction to do your work.

I'm not sure everybody would like a development environment as I describe it, that's why I invite people to try Vim for example for a couple of week (I've some free articles on my blog about that) or i3, and see what they think about it. Exploring new possibilities is never bad.

About learning the tools: I agree, but you can learn much more from some tools than others. I think of Vim as easy to learn, hard to master because there is so many stuff you can do with it. But I used Intellij IDEs as well for a long time, and I don't think it's hard to master, because there's not so much you can master, except maybe the keyboard shortcuts.

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#96

Post by deathanatos »

hartator wrote: post #13

I never got the hate of mouse in the dev community. Isn’t most of work browsing code and Googling things? Making a mouse a way to navigate way more efficient than a keyboard? It seems retrograde.

> I never got the hate of mouse in the dev community. Isn’t most of work browsing code and Googling things?

So, for example, I use a plugin called Tridactyl in Firefox. It allows me to select any link, any button, or enter any text box in just a few keystrokes. I hit one key to tell it "I want to click something", essentially, at which point it highlights the links & assigns them letters; then I type the letters corresponding to my choice. It's competitive with the mouse.

Firefox isn't too bad without extensions, either, since it has the ' key. (Find, but restricted to links. So, ' + type the link text until match + Enter.)

My work keyboard also has keycombos that I can turn a few of the keys into a crude mouse, but it is so slow that it's usually not worth it.

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#98

Post by dharmab »

richardpetersen wrote: post #97

How are you meant to use Stack Overflow?

I use a vim keybindings extension [1]. It allows mouseless browsing of most of the good parts of the web. Notably, it adds a keybind that labels every hyperlink and interactive page element with a sequence of characters you can type to open the link.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#99

Post by redcat7 »

i dont like typing. it is a waste of time and very slow and error prone method at least in my case. i have too big fingers and i make too much spelling errors(not related to fingers). i developed my own style copy/paste/search/replace method. simply i just copy paste tons of code(you cant type so fast) and replace names. removing redundand code is faster then typing new one :) you are not bored typing for the milionth time a for loop? :) dev environments suck with mouse, because people talk things like that(that mouse sucks and that you have to keep your hands on keyboard) and by that no one is spending time on developing dev environments for the mouse. and they are really flawed in this matter. vim and emacs suck at using mouse so please dont say mouse sucks. those editor suck at that. for years i was looking for tools good for my style of work until i figured out that no one makes them and my coding style is completly different from the one for which the tools are made for(i think people sit and type in the code as they go). you can find in many places that to be a dev you have to write code. that to be cool dev you have to type and use vim and there is no other way. which is bullshit. you want to make software faster? you have to operate on big chunks of code and not a single lines. the snippets suck also - you have to know them and interface is often clumsy by default. most of the things you have to remember(i think that makes being a dev hard). why we dont have starcraft like interface to dev?

Re: Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

#100

Post by jeofken »

iamgopal wrote: post #95

Massive popularity of Indian accounting software tally is because of mouse-less handling of the whole interface. Mouse uses three organs while keyboard uses only one.

Mouse requires coordination between hand and eye to do action, but what is the third organ, that a keyboard does not require?
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