Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?

https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/

by darwhy • 9 years ago

157 137 9 years ago

danluu.com

LoSboccacc• 9 years ago

depends, duh. are you typing code or are you documenting a graph?

desireco42• 9 years ago

It depends, if it is wired or wireless ;)

I think we need both to be effective and this is false question in a way, but still good to explore from usability point.

hackcasual• 9 years ago

I never feel while programming that I'm bottlenecked by my input speed.

ythn• 9 years ago

Very true. People talking about how vim is so much more efficient than me using VSCode with my "slow" mouse inputs and I'm just thinking about how my brain is the biggest bottleneck of all - it completely dwarfs keyboard and mouse bottlenecks.

darkerside2• 9 years ago

The slowest and most time-consuming thing is not writing code, but reading code. And vim, for me, optimizes reading a code base distributed across large numbers of files. I can be anywhere I want in seconds.

I know other editors also have fuzzy file finders and text search, but damn does it just feel good surfing text objects at the speed of thought!

hxegon• 9 years ago

I agree 100%. I also feel like vim helps me stay in flow by providing a frictionless input environment. The way vim edits text is pretty close to the way I think about text. "change these quotes", "delete until that >", etc.

WorldMaker2• 9 years ago

VSCode has a great Vim plugin these days and even without it, a ton of good key shortcuts. Not that maybe you need them today, but options if you need them.

I think that's probably the best summary here: it's great having options.

Also, speed isn't the only bottleneck to worry about. It's easy to forget about things like ergonomics. Things like hand movements in mousing and back and forth between mouse and keyboard can slowly take their toll. Again, it's great to have options to control the overall amount of movement.

0x445442• 9 years ago

This! I've been developing for over 20 years. In my experience, it's never been the case that typing speed or keyboard fu has been the bottle neck for that development.

twothamendment• 9 years ago

I agree. I was asked in an interview how fast I type. I didn't know how many WPM, but said "Average - maybe even kinda slow". I followed up with a similar thought - I tend to spend more time thinking about the correct solution, finding the right spot in the code than I do typing. I got the job. I've had the reputation at every job as someone who can get things done quickly so it must not hurt too much. Knowing what to type is way more important than how fast you can lay it down. Of course, having both would be ideal.

ebbv• 9 years ago

It never should be. If it is you're probably churning out some really crap code, and you should stop and think about what you're doing.

hyperpape• 9 years ago

If you're cleaning up some really crap code, input speed becomes an issue. But I do agree that well-factored code makes for less typing, though navigation speed can be very important.

randallsquared• 9 years ago

My bottleneck is usually how many things I can hold in my head at once. Getting things out of my head before I forget them and have to start over is not entirely about input speed, but it does have a significant effect.

nategri• 9 years ago

This is probably the best take I've seen on the issue. Well put.

LukaD• 9 years ago

My input speed definitely is my bottleneck when writing down the code I have constructed in my head. So why not optimize this part of programming?

Tepix2• 9 years ago

Learning to type at 90wpm or so should do the trick.

stinos• 9 years ago

My input speed definitely is my bottleneck when writing down the code I have constructed in my head

Same here. Never learned to type properly and this happens often enough. I can't count the numbers of times I thought 'man, if I'd just have a brain-machine interface which would tranlate my thinking into text this thing would have been done 10 minutes ago'.

Tepix2• 9 years ago

If you see the brain as a multi-stage somewhat parallel pattern matching engine, I wonder if the speed of reading is limited by the mechanical capabilities of the eyes or by brain speed itself.

If it's the brain that's the limit then a computer <-> brain interface will likely be equally slow (or it has to bypass the pattern recognition parts of the brain, which is to say.. most of it)

bluGill2• 9 years ago

Studies (that I don't know how to look up and probably am remembering wrong) show that the eye jumps forward and back while reading. It is easy to use eye tracking to figure out what word your eye is looking at. They used some scheme to figure out what word subjects were reading, and blurred the rest, and it slowed reading down when the next two and previous words were not readable.

Thus the limit is not mechanical as the eye is moving faster than the brain to feed both the current word and preprocessing of the next few.

adrianmonk• 9 years ago

I do sometimes because my only to the computer tends to happen very unevenly, in bursts. I ponder things for a long while, then when something clicks mentally, I want to get it typed in as fast as possible before I lose it.

bo1024• 9 years ago

In my experience, only a small fraction of the time editing a program is spent "inputting" as opposed to editing.

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

I never feel while programming that I'm bottlenecked by my input speed.

I do; it's not a long-term limiting factor, of course, but when an idea crystallizes it's a short-term drag sometimes.

KozmoNau7• 9 years ago

Keyboard is best for digital input (keypresses, either/or actions), and mouse is best for analog input (precision, sweeps, variable speed).

Not that complicated.

darkerside2• 9 years ago

| the author typed a paragraph and then had to replace every “e” with a “|”

As a vim user, just thinking about doing this manually makes me tear up.

jandrese4• 9 years ago

I would write a C program to do it before I would go and manually select/replace every instance using a mouse.

setq• 9 years ago

Depends if I'm being paid by the hour or the job :)

bluGill2• 9 years ago

I assume you would call it sed?

tcfunk• 9 years ago

But what if, in the midst of writing this program, you need to rename all occurrences of a variable?

suprfnk• 9 years ago

Yeah, especially because it's just a simple

  :%s/e/|/g

away.

falcolas• 9 years ago

Or, if you're really bored: ggfer| ;.;.<repeat>

Qwertious3• 9 years ago

Wouldn't that change the entire file, instead of just the one paragraph?

Double_a_92• 9 years ago

Why do you have to do it manually? In every common IDE you can mark your paragraph press Ctrl + R, and enter your search and replace values.

TurboHaskal• 9 years ago

I don't know. I went from "how do I exit vi" to "mice are for losers" to "who am I trying to impress anyway".

My productivity is still crap even though I may look like a professional StarCraft player while coding.

mihaifm• 9 years ago

"who am I trying to impress anyway"

Agree, besides you need your mouse to copy-paste code from StackOverflow anyway

computerex• 9 years ago

Not with Vimium you don't.

rthille• 9 years ago

Not if you browse within emacs :-)

nhumrich• 9 years ago

Its not about speed, its about ergonomics.

FollowSteph3• 9 years ago

If you really want to see the advantage of keyboard hotkeys just look at the top Starcraft players. Yes they still use their mouse but they need hotkeys to even be able to compete at that level. They actually measure the number of actions they can execute per minute! There's no way it can be done only with either just the mouse or keyboard

I think software development also falls into this category. Some hotkeys are at least an order of magnitude faster. And 90% of the time hotkeys will be faster. But in some cases you absolutely need to use your mouse, it's just much faster.

Here's a YouTube video that discusses what it takes to be a competitive Starcraft player and shows them entering actions: https://youtu.be/zmYhX8fjmo8

hultner3• 9 years ago

As a heavy keyboard user I have to agree. I've been using vim extensively and also use vim bindings for my browsers, without them navigation feels constrained. Obviously I still use the mouse for some tasks and certain types of text selection are much easier with a mouse then a keyboard for me.

I'd say that is heavily dependent on personal workflow and taskset.

snarfy• 9 years ago

Obviously I still use the mouse for some tasks and certain types of text selection are much easier with a mouse then a keyboard for me.

Like Starcraft, the best thing the mouse is for is box selection. Everything else is done with keys.

brak1• 9 years ago

what browser do you use for vim bindings?

ams6110• 9 years ago

For me it's not the mouse itself as much as it is moving my hands back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse. I've had RSI symptoms from that. Now I use a ThinkPad keyboard with a trackpoint and no separate mouse.

dom0• 9 years ago

Mice for MOBAs and such have up to tweleve extra hotkeys...

WorldMaker2• 9 years ago

The one Razer product I own is the Naga Hex, because having the keys 1-6 at thumb reach on the mouse is wildly helpful for RPG hotbars. Not that I think I'm that much faster a player, merely that my WARS movement hand gets a little less to do.

digi_owl6• 9 years ago

Now you jogged my memory...

https://www.wired.com/2009/11/18-button-open-office-mouse-ma...

Also, didn't early mouse experiments involve rodents with many more buttons than the 2-3 that's common today?

Qwertious3• 9 years ago

Yes, but you only have one thumb covering all those hotkeys. Pressing them in rapid succession will be much easier in parallel on a keyboard, simply because your four fingers aren't occupied on aiming the mouse and clicking the main two buttons.

ngrilly• 9 years ago

I watched the video: that's incredible! Hopefully, I don't have to be that quick to be a professional dev, or I would be out of business ;-)

antisthenes2• 9 years ago

Starcraft is not a good example, because to play at any level above average, you need both keyboard and mouse.

Neither one is optional. Also the actions undertaken by keyboard/mouse in Starcraft are generally not equivalent, e.g. you cannot select a hotkey group of units with a mouse, unless you select the same units visually where they are, which will always be slower. Same way you won't be making a selection box with a keyboard. Although possible, it is far less precise than a mouse.

In other words, there are certain subsets of actions for which the keyboard OR mouse will always be faster.

This is contrary to operating in a text editor or doing configuration in shell vs gui, where some people have a legitimate preference for doing it with a mouse vs text.

RepressedEmu• 9 years ago

Actually I'm fairly sure (at least in newer SC like HoTS and LoTV) you can select a hotkey group of units with the mouse since they are represented visually in an icon on the screen that can be clicked.

I think the main point was to say the aspects of the game that are faster with the keyboard is around 95+ percent and that top players reduce their use of the mouse to the bare minimum because of its inefficiency.

UnoriginalGuy2• 9 years ago

I think software development also falls into this category.

Software development has absolutely nothing to do with code entry speed.

Requirements gathering, mockups, design, testing, and thought make up the vast majority of development time. Then even once you get down to coding, you're often maintaining existing code rather than writing code from a blank slate, which requires more time reading and thought than actual modifications. A one character code change might take an hour; but you spent that time testing, following workflows, and documenting.

So the supposed developers online who obsess over their mechanical keyboards and 1ms time saved hotkeys really confuse me. I genuinely think the day to day software development that I and my colleagues do has no relationship to this bizarre online fetish with code entry speed.

If I really want to improve my coding performance, I'll do a standing meeting instead of a sit down meeting, reduce the number of people in a meeting, or stop requirements slip by completely clamping down on change requests mid-work. Those are my performance tips, and they save hours, not milliseconds...

lukas099• 9 years ago

What about the argument that less time spent typing (and more 'automatic' text editing) means shorter interruptions from thinking, and therefore more productive thought?

DavidWoof• 9 years ago

As someone who obsesses online over my mechanical keyboard (cherry mx clear today, but I have a collection), system hotkeys and .vimrc, I actually generally agree with this. Code entry time has almost nothing to do with software development productivity. It's just stuff I enjoy, and the fact that people get obsessed by it shouldn't confuse you any more than the myriad of other things people obsess about online. Learning to save a keystroke in vim is really just my equivalent of learning to kill a certain monster in a video game.

On the other hand, I'm generally shocked when I meet programmers who don't know their tools at all, and in my experience that really does correspond to poor productivity. I'm not talking about people with average typing speed or people who use toolbar shortcuts rather than hotkeys, but programmers who don't know how to auto-format in their tool of choice or who stop typing every few keys to reach for the mouse, click file and then save. There's a mindset that goes with effective software development, and a natural curiosity and a constant desire to do things just a bit more efficiently are key factors in that mindset. People who are constantly getting out of the flow even in their editor of choice because they haven't learned to use the tool efficiently might not have the right mindset for software development.

But yeah, I recognize that the vim golf stuff is silly (but fun!).

ganonm• 9 years ago

For me a large part of the reason I use Vim and only Vim for writing code is it just makes the experience so much more enjoyable. I realise this is quite subjective, but my personal experience is that whenever I use a colleague's non-modal editor I find the experience frustrating even though I know how to use it. Years of using Vim has sensitised me to the constant annoyances that accompany using a conventional editor.

Has Vim sped up the rate at which I can edit text? Probably, but for me this is missing the point.

I'm not a physiotherapist but being able to rest my forearms/wrists on the table 99% of the time when using Vim significantly reduces the risk of RSI.

Terr_• 9 years ago

I completely agree that code writing speed is not the important metric.

However, keyboard shortcuts can still be very useful for the tasks of testing and debugging. Consider the problem of stepping through many lines of code, or copy-pasting data from one place to another in order to run a test.

Lastly, when you know what you want to write (or refactor) it helps if the input system just fast enough that you can keep your sensation of flow. This part is probably highly variable among individuals.

mistercow2• 9 years ago

Software development has absolutely nothing to do with code entry speed.

I think this is false. I think, then I type. Then I think, then I type. The more time I spend entering code, the more I lose context on the problem. So while it's not as simple as "speed * time = total amount of code written", I'm fairly certain that code entry speed has a significant impact on my productivity.

Typing speed and use of shortcuts may not be the most important skills for a software developer, but I think it's borderline ludicrous to claim that they're irrelevant. For a trivial counterexample, try coding using an onscreen keyboard and mouse.

braveo• 9 years ago

hotkeys aren't about code entry.

I bet when you're in visual studio you hit F5 to debug instead of moving your mouse up and trying to hit the small button.

You probably also use Ctrl+<space> when need to pop up autocomplete directly, or Ctrl+r+r when you want to rename something quickly.

It's an idea known as 'death by a thousand small cuts'. Perhaps each individual build isn't significantly quicker using keyboard over mouse, but do it all day and it becomes significant.

This doesn't even start to consider the mental attention required for mouse usage vs keyboard usage. Every context shift potentially slows you down even more due to non-physical issues.

Trying to frame this as a discussion bout typing speed is just not accurate.

drak0n1c• 9 years ago

There are mice with an array of thumb buttons on them that can be assigned to keyboard macros these days, they are advertised as MMO mice.

chrismorgan3• 9 years ago

If you really want to make the question more interesting, throw a touchscreen at it.

For general UI purposes, mice are hopeless when you compare them to your fingers touching the screen directly.

oblio2• 9 years ago

To be honest, if we could somehow make an effective pen technology, that would beat both hands down in many scenarios.

There's a reason we don't write things using our bare fingers :)

chrismorgan3• 9 years ago

I use my Surface Book with touchpad (pointer/mouse), keyboard, touch and pen. Pen and touch can work quite nicely together, e.g. in Maps using touch to pan and zoom and pen to write, all in the one hand. But it certainly requires the software to have been designed with all of these possibilities in mind.

juandazapata• 9 years ago

I'm not sure if that applies to a 32" 4k display that is positioned about 10" away from the user in a typical desktop setting. I can't only imagine the pain in my shoulders.

digi_owl6• 9 years ago

I guess that is why Microsoft added the hinge on their Surface Studio.

jandrese4• 9 years ago

Selecting text with a touchscreen is the pits. My big fat fingers obscure what I'm trying to select and most of the UXes fit touchacreens make text selection a second class citizen.

Razengan3• 9 years ago

Selecting text with a touchscreen

is really not that inconvenient with the force-touch-on-keyboard on iPhones, and two-finger-swipe-on-keyboard on iPads.

chrismorgan3• 9 years ago

I said “general UI purposes” rather than “everything” very deliberately; certainly touch is ghastly for some things.

digi_owl6• 9 years ago

I dunno. I keep screwing up when picking an entry from a list of them on my phone. Perhaps because there is no way for me to correct by dragging my finger elsewhere unlike with a mouse (outside of web links most mouse actions happen on button release, not button press).

andybak• 9 years ago

Another point missed by anyone using the AskTog article to argue against the need for keyboard shortcuts is the fact that you have two hands.

My own Photoshop use often involves simultaneous or near-simultaneous use of both keyboard and mouse. Sometimes I start one action before the other is completed so my hand or cursor is already near the right place.

There is no conceivable keyboard-only or mouse-only control scheme that could better this for one important reason: assuming some use of the mouse is needed (true of Photoshop and many other applications although probably not true of text editors and IDEs) then the cost of moving my right hand from the mouse to the keyboard and back again is a very large cost.

digi_owl6• 9 years ago

https://i.imgur.com/IZf6hSx.jpg

An image i ran across a while back, apparently the work area of some manga artist.

Interesting all the square buttons are programmable keys, so each of them is likely mapped to a hotkey or similar.

kps2• 9 years ago

  > you have two hands.

Every watch ‘the mother of all demos’⁰? Engelbart's system was designed to be used with one hand on the mouse and the other on the chordset. Xerox followed this with the Alto, and on to the Star¹, eventually dropping the chordset but with the same model: the mouse and the left-side function key block worked together.²

⁰ https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY

¹ http://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/keyboard/

² https://youtu.be/_OwG_rQ_Hqw?t=54m25s

Crespyl• 9 years ago

This "context switch" cost of moving from keyboard only to keyboard+mouse (or mouse only) is why I always have both VimFX for keyboard controls in FireFox, and FireGestures, for mouse-only tools for doing most things.

Whether I'm leaning back in my chair with a hand on the mouse, or sitting forward with both ands on the keyboard, I can have all or most functionality available without having to reposition.

jbmorgado• 9 years ago

For me isn't just the fact that using the keyboard is faster to carry out a specific task, it is also that in Vim (or most places using a good keyboard layout) I don't have to take my fingers out of the home row and then carrying out the next action is also faster.

Merad• 9 years ago

The real question is, does it matter? I've been programming for nearly 15 years and I'm really struggling to think of a time that my productivity has been limited by the speed with which I can interact with the computer. I've never actually tried to keep track of how my time is spent, but these days I wouldn't be surprised if I average 5+ minutes of reading/thinking/planning/discussing/etc. for every minute spent editing code.

TeMPOraL2• 9 years ago

For me, it's a matter of maintaining flow. I don't type code all the time, but when I do, I want to edit at the speed of thought.

mnem• 9 years ago

I suspect you'd need a few chord based keyboards to edit at the speed of though.

bloomca• 9 years ago

To be honest, I'd go even further - I think we rarely code more than 10% of our time. I know, there is an argument that implementation matters – you don't think about typing at all with good sense of the keyboard, but I personally think it is overrated; unless you are super slow typists, it does not really matter.

What matters, though, is the fact that it is some kind of an art – people master it, people enjoy when they are able to accomplish some tasks in an elegant way (coarse example is macro in vim).

oddsockmachine• 9 years ago

I experienced this recently. Crashed my bike, and broke my wrists. Had about a month where I could only type with one finger at a time, or gently use a touchpad. I thought it would be fine, since I could take my time and think things through fully in my head before typing the code. Instead, I found it so difficult - as if I could only think as quickly as I could type.

bonoetmalo• 9 years ago

I use my keyboard plenty when just navigating and reading code. The mainline at work is some 100k+ source files

Razengan3• 9 years ago

Regarding speed across overall, day-to-day usage, the trackpad is closer than a mouse – you can move the pointer a fair distance and click/etc. with just your thumb while keeping your hands on the keys.

And on the new MacBooks, I'm pleasantly surprised how the Touch Bar saves me from even reaching for the trackpad, sometimes.

plazmatic• 9 years ago

Interesting post. Thanks!

creeble3• 9 years ago

Anyone have RSI problems with mice?

I switched to a touchpad over 10 years ago, and my right hand RSI problems went away.

But with an Ubuntu 16.04 upgrade, the touchpad driver went to hell (don't get me started...) and I've been using a mouse again for the last several months. So far no problems, but I really wish I could go back to my once-trusty Logitech touchpad.

mnm13• 9 years ago

Yes. I'm waiting for Apple magic track pad 2 support in Linux before I switch. It's by far the best track pad I've ever used. Unfortunately Linux track pad support is shit as you point out. I'm hopeful it won't be in a few years. And people still wonder why Linux on the desktop will never happen. This is why.

creeble3• 9 years ago

My experience was that my trackpads worked perfectly with 12.04 and 14.04, but in 16.04 they changed the driver to... something that uses 'synclient' to adjust parameters. And this was a disaster; there are some 60 params that affect operation, and many of them have completely non-working defaults (like you sweep your finger across the touchpad and it randomly selects stuff).

I tried for weeks to try and find some synclient settings that made my trackpad work as well as it did in 12.04, to no avail. I have another machine still running 14.04 (don't ask) and the trackpad still works perfectly.

I tried posting on StackExchange, but I am apparently the only person (besides you?) that cares about Linux support for trackpads, or has trouble with the support in the current driver.

So yes, I'll second your comment about Linux on the desktop.

whizzkid• 9 years ago

One important area on where keyboard gets an unknown advantage is the muscle memory.

Using mouse will require attention from your hand and eye both at the same time. On keyboard, you can let your fingers work while resting your eyes.

joegosse• 9 years ago

Learning keyboard shortcuts in Excel yields massive returns on productivity. For an intro, Joel Spolsky has a great tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Investment bankers are famous for working without a mouse in Excel.

WhiteOwlLion• 9 years ago

There's a lot more potential for repetitive stress injury (e.g. carpal tunnel) with using mouse on one hand constantly. At least with a keyboard, you are distributing the stress among four fingers and a thumb. Although, admittedly I use my right thumb for space rather than alternating with my left thumb.

kps2• 9 years ago

Back when the Ask Tog piece came out, I wrote a Slashdot comment along the same lines as this article.

I had one additional point. Keeping in mind that this uses a WYSIWIG editor, use a very slightly different benchmark task: instead of replacing every ‘e’ with ‘|’, replace every ‘l’ with ‘|’ — and by the way, your text is in 6 point Helvetica. And you'd better not miss any, or replace any ‘I’s.

The key (badum tish) is that characters on a keyboard are semantically connected to characters in a document, in a direct and obvious way. By contrast, there is no such direct link between mouse (or touch) and the document, only a transient link via the document's current presentation. With a keyboard, you can operate on text; with a mouse, you can only operate on pictures of text.

KirinDave• 9 years ago

By contrast, there is no such direct link between mouse (or touch) and the document, only a transient link via the document's current presentation.

It need not be this way. It's simply an utter lack of imagination on part of modern peripheral makers. I had a touchstream keyboard and after a bit of work I had emacs integration that was absolutely fantastic and involved semantic gestures.

There is nothing fundamentally flawed about suggesting that gestures could be semantically meaningful.

jlouis• 9 years ago

Having spent a lot of time in emacs, vim and plan9's acme(1) editor (which uses the mouse heavily):

The speed is about the same for most work. The time spent thinking is the major task which happens, so the time it takes to edit your buffer is not that dominating.

When you have unique reordering which you only have to do once, the mouse in acme(1) tend to beat emacs/vi. One subtle trick is that the acme cursor sits "between" characters, not "on" a character, which makes selection of text much faster. Also, if you click on eg, { it marks to the }. You need a precise mouse and some acceleration to make mouse flicks possible, but then it absolutely rocks.

On the other hand, whenever you have a repeated task, you are better off programming a solution. Here macros or vi move-style comes in handy. In acme(1), you use the built-in command language (which is close to the sam(1) command language). It is a bit easier in emacs/vi I think, but only a bit.

disclaimer: I didn't really time myself, so there may be a perception mistake in these observations. But I don't find one method vastly faster than the other. In a typical editing session, the mix of tasks makes sure that on average the editing speed is about the same. OTOH, I have enough muscle memory for emacs-fluency, so a newcomer would probably be faster on the mouse than in a keyboard-binding-experienced vi/emacs programmer.

js8• 9 years ago

Another problematic point that perhaps should be raised about those studies:

Most of today's software is optimized for usage of mouse, with keyboard only as afterthought. But we should compare software optimally designed for the use of the mouse with software optimally designed for the use of the keyboard (e.g. Vim). Though I am not sure former really exists - which is perhaps a testament of how slow mouse actually is. :-)

Qwertious3• 9 years ago

Most of today's software is optimized for usage of mouse, with keyboard only as afterthought.

And can I add my personal pet peeve: Keyboard COMMANDS are referred to as keyboard "shortcuts". As if using the keyboard for anything other than typing text is somehow an invalid usage, and the real way of doing it is with a mouse or something?

jlebrech• 9 years ago

eyetracking and AI should be able to replace the mouse.

mnm13• 9 years ago

As someone diagnosed with RSI, I'm looking for ways to type and use my track pad slower and less of the time. I find that other than text chatting with my co workers, nothing really depends on me being able to type fast. I don't know what kind of programming work the author does, but I find I have to type/track pad very little even for large refactorings and slowing down from about 80wpm typing to probably half that hasn't really affected my working speed. I'd say I'm at least half to a quarter as slow both typing and tracking (used to use a trackball which was faster than any track pad or mouse) and it's affected my overall speed less than 10%. There are many ways to automate and avoid a lot of repetitive actions in programming which also help quite a bit.

moomin• 9 years ago

Never mind whether it's faster. Is it more comfortable and less likely to give you RSI? Grief yes.

Ironically, this is especially true for things muce are faster at. Drag and drop is fast, but it kills your hand.

tutufan• 9 years ago

Spent some time on this a while back, and even wrote a driver that let me use a game controller as a complete replacement for my keyboard and mouse. Interesting but not really successful.

One key takeaway: The input bitrate that a competent typist can get from a keyboard is quite high. As a guess, it might be 8x higher than with a gamepad or mouse.

And as an additional detail, I've had more RSI issues with mice than keyboards over the years, even though I use emacs.

Morantron• 9 years ago

If you want the fastest way in existence to copy/paste in terminal

https://github.com/morantron/tmux-fingers

had2makeanacct• 9 years ago

Okay that was quite hard to read, any reason for no formatting at all?

joeyespo• 9 years ago

Agreed.

Been using My Style [1] for readability on his site. Even this small tweak helped:

    body {
      max-width: 768px;
      margin: 32px auto;
      font-family: Helvetica;
      font-size: 20px;
    }

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/my-style/ljdhjpmbn...

mindleyhilner• 9 years ago

Small typo: "hunt-and-pack" should be "hunt-and-peck."

nobodyorother• 9 years ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Keystroke Level Modeling (KLM) or CogTool (github.com/cogtool/cogtool), which divides up UI interactions into discrete actions with specific times. It gives a pretty reasonable estimate overall, and is great for comparing between multiple competing concepts/usage-models.

Karrot_Kream• 9 years ago

An article is posted bemoaning the lack of rigor in mouse and keyboard speed measurements. Instead of posting anything of rigor, tons of posts are done about more anecdotal input experiences.

I love my keyboard-heavy emacs workflow, but come on, at least pretend to read the article or seek some rigor in things.

rjmill• 9 years ago

My mouse cursor is in a different place every time I reach for it. My keyboard is always in the same place. Sure, if I'm using a cursor with my keyboard, I'll have the same problem, but at least the cursor tends to be in the exact same spot I was already focusing my attention, ie where I was just typing.

If I'm executing an action with my mouse, the path between my cursor's current location and where I need to click is almost always different. I have to move my attention to the cursor, and I can't just rely on muscle memory to do the command.

If I'm executing an action with a hotkey, the path between the home row and the keys I need to hit are always the same. If it's something I do frequently, it's in my muscle memory, and I don't have to shift my attention away from the task at hand.

I don't care much about the speed at which I can accomplish a single action (as long as it's not unbearably slow), but I do care about having to shift my attention away from what I'm doing. If I'm doing something that requires a lot of typing (eg, programming), I'll try to do as much as possible with the keyboard. If I'm in a novel environment and have to rely on visual cues (eg, surfing the web), I'll do most things with the mouse.

marcell• 9 years ago

Keyboard can be a bit slower, but I find that moving to the mouse interrupts my train of thought. I'm not sure why but it seems to engage a different part of my brain that pauses what I'm thinking about.

dllthomas• 9 years ago

Also worth mentioning, when it comes to picking or pointing from the keyboard, is keynav. It lets you do a binary search in screen-space, which can be pretty fast (though probably slower than the mouse if your hand is already on it).

tincholio• 9 years ago

About this Tog guy, I've never heard of him before, but for all his claims of doing UX research, he has 0 peer-reviewed papers, and the "experiment" about the 'e's and the pipes is so laughably bad, that I wonder what's the point in taking anything of what he says seriously.

InTempWeTrust• 9 years ago

The problem is the whole mouse physics.. if you could look at a point and then click.. that would be a dream.

MichaelMoser123• 9 years ago

My big problem in productivity is multiple cut and paste buffers in vim; i would love to see a good way to use that.

Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?

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