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Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the mouse is obsolete, just that it's an obstruction when it comes to editing text. Vim, emacs, and my current favorite, kakoune, all give you a rich language for talking to the computer about how you want your text to be arranged. The mouse doesn't speak that language. It requires you to switch from thinking about text as text to thinking about it as a pixel target. That may only feel natural if you play a lot of FPS games.

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While I do agree that when it comes to editing Vim/emacs/kaoune might be superior, I spend a nontrivial amount of my coding time in 'discovery' mode. scrolling, clicking around, and mouse stuff in general is very useful in that case, and in my experience definitely faster than keyboard-only.

I could try and make a nuanced argument of when and where a mouse is preferable to a keyboard, but I think even just scrolling is enough of an argument for me. CTRL-D or whatnot just doesn't do justice to scrolling with a mouse.

Anyways, mostly I'm a fan of Vim and using its approach as much as possible. I just get annoyed when Vim-fans try to argue that a mouse is never better, which honestly I feel is a the argument of a fanatic. I've never come across a remotely good argument as to why a mouse is never the answer, and it always feels like a needlessly 'partisan' type thing.

Keyboards are cool. Mice are cool. Can we all just get along?

EDIT: I got a bit carried away and I do agree more with you than this comment might suggest. I just think 'editing' is not the only thing I do when coding, and for some of that other stuff a mouse is a huge advantage, even in a coding context.

> I do agree more with you than this comment might suggest

Well spoken, that goes for me too. Something about internet discussions amplifies disagreement!

> Keyboards are cool. Mice are cool. Can we all just get along?

Agreed.

I'm a vim fanboy - and I use the mouse.

>Vim/emacs/kaoune might be superior

My google-fu is failing me; what is kaoune?

Parent probably meant Kakoune: http://kakoune.org

Indeed I did. Kak is great, especially if you find yourself often using visual mode in vim.

Re: scrolling, in vim you have CTRL-E and CTRL-Y and there must be a way to adjust the scroll step (usually 1) to the scroll step of your mouse wheel (usually like 3) is bound. Can a mouse do 30 scrollings per second (my keyboard input rate)?

Where the scroll wheel makes a difference is when you want to fine tune the scrolling speed, which you can't do with a keyboard. I don't think I have a usecase for that (but YMMV), and my impression is it often gets me out of text mode and into FPS mode.

What would be really nice for larger scroll steps (like CTRL-D) is smooth scrolling. I suppose there is no terminal support for this? Also gvim doesn't seem to have it.

Anyway I usually don't scroll by fixed amounts, but do * (identifier search), / (regex search), { and }, and maybe more.

EDIT: just added this to my vimrc. I don't think my mouse scrolling ever was this good

   " Triple scrolling "speed"
   nnoremap <C-e> 3<C-e>
   nnoremap <C-y> 3<C-y>

you also have ^f ^b (forward, back (by a page)), and ^u ^d (up, down (by half a page)). I honestly prefer scrolling by paragraph though ({ })

> That may only feel natural if you play a lot of FPS games.

Or almost any kind of PC games. There is learning curve to using a mouse, but it is quite short and once you're over the hump you can use the mouse without thinking about it. The cognitive overhead of the mouse is minimal. There are studies about this: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi22KeyboardVMouse2.html

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