Keyboard vs. The Mouse, Part 1 (1989)
TLDR: Keyboards are best for professional developers. Mice are still best for manipulators--photo editing, etc. Trackpads are best for consuming content like browsing and reading email.<p>From the article:<p>&gt; Keyboarders only think they are faster—I think its because of the sound of the keys ...<p>This might be true, <i>as a generalization</i>, but it should be obvious that it doesn&#x27;t apply to everyone. That&#x27;s a bit like me pontificating on how a basketball free-throw should executed. Listening to me or studying my free-throw will reveal <i>nothing</i> interesting or important about performing a free-throw. Talk to a professional player, study the players that hit over 90% of their free-throws, but don&#x27;t try to draw conclusions from non-players just making thing up.<p>I can&#x27;t play basketball worth a crap, but I have used computers and their interfaces for over 50 years. All this time I have been programming, and I&#x27;ve programmed on more different systems than I can remember (really).<p>I&#x27;ve used every mainstream word-processor and every mainstream text-editor, often for years at a time. I have owned at least 100 keyboards and 100 mice and trackpads over the years. These are my personal observations.<p>* People are surprisingly good at learning repetitive fine motor skills. The average typing speed of regular people is surprising and would be, IMHO, counter-intuitive if not for our ubiquitous exposure to good typists and piano players.<p>* One doesn&#x27;t need to be a great typist. My big fingers seem to be made for picking up rocks, not for typing, so I &quot;only&quot; type around 50-60 wpm despite half a century at the keyboard. However, even at half this speed my thinking speed is what limits most of my coding speed and writing speed. I don&#x27;t do data-entry or transcription where more speed would be really valuable.<p>* Fast typists are fast because they make less mistakes than the rest of us[1].<p>* Qwerty is superior to Dvorak, Workman, Coleman, and other layouts for me because I
have to use other people&#x27;s keyboards often. I don&#x27;t work entirely by myself. If I did I might be drawn to these improved layouts, but even then a small percentage increase in typing speed wouldn&#x27;t be a big benefit for me (see above). Furthermore, my hands don&#x27;t seem to be vulnerable to Emacs pinky syndrome or repetitive use issues where these layouts do seem to be beneficial.<p>* The strange historical accident that gave us staggered keyboard keys[2] is unfortunate. I have experimented with ortholinear keyboards, I have two TEK keyboards[3] and two Kinesis Advantage[4] keyboards. These keyboards have the keys arranged in columns. I really like the Advantage layout, but I make errors when jumping back and forth between my laptop keyboard and my more extreme ergonomic keyboards. However, the main advantage of these alternative layouts for me is not their ergonomics (see above) but the <i>better utilization of the thumbs for accessing additional &quot;shift&quot; keys</i> layers (control, alt, meta, hyper, command) and special vim style leader keys. I have tried the other ortholinear keyboards as well[5].<p>* Major keyboard manufacturers have ergo-style keyboards, but they suffer from poor physical keys (like my Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard[6]) or poor utilization of the thumbs (the Microsoft keyboard has split shift keys, which is good, but they can&#x27;t be programmed to transmit different keystrokes, which is bad).<p>* The mouse is really good at controlling analog style controls on the screen.<p>* The mouse is really bad for drawing. For this a tablet is slightly better--I own six. I also have also owned a couple of expensive Wacom tablet&#x2F;display combinations[6] these fail to be useful to me because they are (1) poor displays, (2) expensive, (3) awkwardly big, (4) require software drivers and hardware interfaces that don&#x27;t work with my newer equipment--usb-c thunderbolt for example.<p>* The iPad Pro with Apple Pencil if the best really practical, useful stylus for drawing note taking that I have found. It also is quite easy to use as a tablet with a Mac.<p>* The one-button mouse was great for my Mom, but I am more productive with more buttons, and for gaming I regularly use a gaming mouse that has 12 thumb buttons. This works great, but it does take a few hundred hours of use to become proficient. (My daughter, an avid gamer, turned me on to the Razor mouse[7]).<p>* The Apple trackpads are the best trackpads. Trackpads seem particularly well suited for content <i>consumption</i>, like browsing the internet and reading email. They are much less suited for operating other analog style screen based interfaces such as draging icons (folders, selected files, etc.) around the screen. For these later tasks, a mouse is superior.<p>* The Macbook Touch Bar is pretty, but for professional users, it is not worth giving up function keys to have a touch bar. The lack of an escape key makes it difficult to use vim. I can remap the escape to caps-lock or use a control-key combination instead, but then I fumble around when I&#x27;m trying to use a different system. The butterfly keys suck--I haven&#x27;t decided when&#x2F;if I&#x27;m going to buy a new Apple MacBook Pro with the newer keys because they still don&#x27;t have function keys. Furthermore, my desktop Apple systems don&#x27;t have the same keyboards and they don&#x27;t have the Touch Bar.<p>* In the early days of GUI interfaces, Apple was right to put the menu at the top of the screen. It served two purposes, it prevented confusion as to which app menu on a cluttered screen was the correct one to interact with and it was easy to get the mouse to the menu--just shove the mouse up and to the left. It eventually hit the upper corner of the screen where you could visually pick up the cursor and guide it to the appropriate menu item. With separate windows on MS one had to guide the cursor visually all the way to the menu. However, now with the large&#x2F;wide&#x2F;multiple screens on my desktop systems it means dragging the mouse a long way from where I was using it to interact with a menu.<p>* I&#x27;m not very happy with the wide variety of keybindings that exist for Emacs. However, a properly configured Emacs system has the <i>absolute best</i> system there is for managing software that has one-thousand different functions that a user may want to execute. Nothing I&#x27;ve seen compares to a well configured Emacs for making hundreds of commands available at one&#x27;s fingertips. Using a mouse instead would be laughable. Emacs requires an investment in time that will not be worth the effort for most people. Like practicing free-throws, there is no point for a regular person to master Emacs. However, if you strive to be a professional developer (or basketball player) practice makes perfect and it is worth your effort.<p>* Configuring Emacs is important, however it is completely programmable so there is no limit to how much time this will take. Stand on the shoulders of the giants that have come before us and use someone else&#x27;s configuration. Spacemacs and Doom are great configurations there are many others[9,10,11]<p>* Vim is great too and is better than Emacs at some things (but I&#x27;m currently being faithful to Emacs)<p>* Keypunch machines suck as IDEs. Just ahead of keypunch machines on the hierarchy are line editors on paper teletype machines. The next step up are editors like TECO. All of these are archaic ways to program that I&#x27;ve been saddled with in the past.<p>* <i>Real</i> developers should adopt tools as powerful as they can learn to control: Emacs, neovim, and JetBrains suite of tools, all take study, pick one because they are totally worth it. There are other editors, but don&#x27;t wimp out and pick one less powerful than you can handle. Almost every developer should also learn git, another tool that has tremendous advantages and is worth the effort. Every academic that works with mathematics, data, or code should learn LaTeX--this will take time but again it&#x27;s worth it for serious work.<p>* Xah Lee has thought about keyboard, mice, and menus a lot. I like his thinking about keyboards; you should check out his website if this subject interests you. [8]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;userinterfaces.aalto.fi&#x2F;136Mkeystrokes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;userinterfaces.aalto.fi&#x2F;136Mkeystrokes&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;quora&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;why-was-the-qwerty-keyboard-layout-invented&#x2F;#17594da757ae" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;quora&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;why-was-the-qw...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trulyergonomic.com&#x2F;ergonomic-keyboards&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trulyergonomic.com&#x2F;ergonomic-keyboards&#x2F;</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinesis-ergo.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;advantage2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinesis-ergo.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;advantage2&#x2F;</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keyboard.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keyboard.io</a><p>[6] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wacom.com&#x2F;en-us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wacom.com&#x2F;en-us</a><p>[7] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.razer.com&#x2F;gaming-mice&#x2F;razer-naga-trinity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.razer.com&#x2F;gaming-mice&#x2F;razer-naga-trinity</a><p>[8] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xahlee.info&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xahlee.info&#x2F;index.html</a><p>[9] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacemacs.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacemacs.org</a><p>[10] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hlissner&#x2F;doom-emacs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hlissner&#x2F;doom-emacs</a><p>[11] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.sachachua.com&#x2F;.emacs.d&#x2F;Sacha.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.sachachua.com&#x2F;.emacs.d&#x2F;Sacha.html</a>