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Comment by icefox | Hacker News Reader

One extremely annoying bit watching the video is that for an IDE manipulating text files it requires that your hand never leave the mouse. Every single operation it looks like requires that you right click, click to activate, click to drop down, click to open. Even the 'insta-search' box requires a click. Someone should buy a one button mouse and install it on their computer or just take the mouse away completely. A mouse has a place, but it shouldn't be the primary means of interacting with something that is text.

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This was my exact impression; I hate leaving the keyboard when I'm writing or reading code. To simulate some of the functionality of codebubble in vim, I :vsp the same file and scroll up/down to the method I want.

I have, however, come to realize that navigation through a large project with keys alone is suboptimal. One typo in a nav command and you have to press at least four or five more keys. With the mouse, you're less likely to make such mistakes and your retry time would also be low. It'd be like trying to browse the web using the keyboard alone... even I, a hardcore vim user, found firefox/vimperator underwhelming to say the least.

What would be awesome is if they made some sort of hybrid superintelligent keyboard where the whole keyboard surface could also act as sort of a multi-touchpad. As a compromise, I've found that the thinkpad-style pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard does a fair job.

This is exactly why I love the "Open File in Project" functionality that exists in some editors/IDEs (e.g., SlickEdit). It lets you type the filename, and does a "fuzzy search" match on it.

Practically, this means that whatever file you think of, you can type any part of its name at any time to get to it. Once I got used to working this way, I stopped using the project tree-view: it's just much slower.

Agreed. The keyboard shortcut in Eclipse (at least in C/C++ mode, not sure if that changes for other languages) is Ctrl-Shift-R.

For those of you using Visual Studio, there is an addon called StudioTools that adds this functionality: http://submain.com/products/studiotools.aspx

Highly recommended, they both have a smart open file that lets you start typing a filename, and smart goto, which lets you start typing a class or method name. Makes navigation so much faster!

Vim has a good plugin for this, FuzzyFileFinder. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1894614/vim-fuzzyfinder-u... for instructions on how to set it up.

Ctrl-Shift-t for similar behavior for "Open Type" in Eclipse, also Ctrl-o is handy for a popup outline for autocomplete navigation to methods/members (if you have huge bloated Java files for example).

There used to be a keyboard like that, called FingerWorks. Was acquired by Apple and was never heard of again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

FingerWorks technology became the iPhone touchscreen.

Good support for keyboard navigation combined with some amount of smartness about the AST can work wonders, though. Most modern Java IDEs do a fair job of this.

The plan9 folks would disagree quite vehemently. We are used to keyboard operations being more efficient for most tasks, but the keyboard operation for "go to the file over there, the one 3 links over semi-related to this one" may be slower than just clicking.

Yes, but there is a big difference between typing part of the file or function name and typing a full path. Search-based semi-global matching is a really fast way to navigate.

Later on in the video they showed some examples of keyboard shortcuts, so there are some in there, but I agree, it's not entirely clear whether or not mouse-free code sessions are possible.

To some extent you'll need mouse-interaction, for dragging things and clearly visual stuff like that (nobody likes to position things with the keyboard, or at least they shouldn't), but they should really do their best to add keyboard hooks to almost everything that they can, definitely.

It may not be useful when you're trying to bang out new modules but for me the majority of my debugging is done by looking through the code... not much typing going on.

How about a SmartNav head tracker plus footpedal switches for the mouse buttons? A Unicomp EnduraPro keyboard with pointer stick would be cheaper, though, and that's not a cheap keyboard.

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