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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

I'm not understanding the adversion to the keyboard in the comments here. It's just faster. I prefer not having to reach over and find the mouse or trackpad, then wiggle around to find the cursor. Useful only when the keyboard ux is bad.

Imagine playing piano while having to take a hand off the keys and find a mouse during the song. It would be impossible to keep up. Keyboard only is speedy when learned.

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I think the point is, that a keyboard is better when you know what you are doing, and a mouse is more suitable for “discovery” i.e. when you dont know what you are doing.

This jives quite well for me. When I’m working keyboard is almost always better, but when I’m messing around with software I’m unfamiliar with and I haven't yet familiarised myself with the keys for it, I’ll poke around with a mouse. Once I figure out my workflow then I’ll probably use the keys more.

Yes and no. I discovered just fine with a keyboard, arguably better than with a mouse. Tap the Alt key, use the arrows to explore the menus.

Unlike with a mouse, the keyboard never "fell off" the active menu tree requiring me to start over.

Unlike with a mouse, the keyboard couldn't hide things until I moused-over them. Recently I spent quite a while trying to find the zoom controls on a PDF because they were transparent until I randomly waved the mouse in a corner of the screen where there were no controls.

Mouse-driven discovery sucks, IMHO/IME.

> Tap the Alt key, use the arrows to explore the menus.

You have to know that this is possible as a user, and app developers have to support it, and/or not override the default operating system handling.

This is, without a doubt, an area that we have regressed on. I remember very clearly that when I was first learning to program VB6, UI conventions were pretty standardized on Windows, and so you just did a lot of this stuff by default - you had a &File menu, and &New, &Load, &Save, and E&xit commands on it.

Some software still does this, but it is increasingly rare; in Chrome right now, the Alt key doesn't do anything, and I find that Electron apps have to go out of their way to mimic native conventions, as VS Code does.

So there's less software that follows keyboard-driven conventions, so fewer users know about those conventions, creating a vicious circle. Not to mention that the bulk of your average person's "computer" usage is poking at a touchscreen phone or tablet that has no physical keys at all, just godawful on-screen keyboards.

I think the average user did know it was possible, because the hotkeys for everything were shown in the menu, and "alt-f" to open the file menu was just how things were done. Or you could click on it with the mouse, and still see the hotkeys to get back to it faster next time.

The user-hostile pattern of nested levels of mouse-maze menu, which collapse if you stray one pixel out of the required path, absolutely infuriates me. I can't imagine who thought this was a good idea or what sort of pointing device they used.

What you're really describing is bad UI design. It's not a fault with the interaction method at all. Your whole argument that "keys are well documented" can fall down if a developer doesn't bother their hole to document their keys, or to follow a standard keyboard pattern.

I completely agree it's bad UI design, but it's also become the standard. Some modern "standard" did away with buttons that look like the buttons we spent 20 years learning the look of, scroll bars that look like the scroll bars we spent 20 years learning the look of, hotkeys with underlined letters that we spent 20 years looking for and learning to speed our interaction with frequently-used programs.

It's absolutely bad UI design, but I think it's become the rule rather than the exception. It's just "prettier", according to some jerk who never used a hotkey in his life.

I understand you now. I think this has more to do with the prevalence of "touch" than mouses particularly.

> It's just "prettier", according to some jerk

Some would say "brave" and with jerk I think you're being too kind :-)

I'm not taking sides on this one, but thought you might find this article interesting that was posted here 2 days ago. https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

The key take-away was they spent a lot of money on a research project specifically about mouse vs. keyboard and found the precise opposite to be true! Surprising to say the least.

* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Considering all the time I have wasted in recent years wrestling with text selection and cursor positioning on touchscreen devices, this discussion seems delightfully pointless: they are both so much faster than the third option that any difference between the two must be insignificant.

I have no idea why you're getting downvoted.

Supplying actual data is always useful.

Especially when it contradicts a common opinion ;)

Supplying actual data is always useful. If only that article did that :).

Sometimes, articles that contradict a common opinion do so because they're simply dead wrong. This is one of those cases.

I'll admit it's not much data, and there doesn't appear to be a source. But it vaguely refers to a study, and doesn't just reflect the authors preferences.

Did Apple do a study? Did it come to the conclusion that the mouse was faster? If so, why is it dead wrong?

I don't know if Apple did a study, and I'm not particularly inclined to look hard for it, because the argumentation from the article series itself is pretty much bogus and uses some weird test setups (like https://www.asktog.com/SunWorldColumns/S02KeyboardVMouse3.ht... and the e -> | replacement game); that, coupled with my real-world experience which every day proves superiority of keyboard over mouse in structured interfaces, leads me to assign very low prior to the validity of the conclusion of that Apple study, as reported by Tog.

(The study perhaps had a more narrow set of conclusions than presented in the article. Wouldn't surprise me.)

> The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding

Without specifying how it was tested that's meaningless. For example I've read of a test where keyboard users were slower because they had to do a find/replace operation on a file manually, moving the cursor only with arrow keys. That's like saying using the mouse is slower after forcing mouse users to type text on a virtual keyboard.

I think in most scenarios both can be fast enough that the difference doesn't matter, provided there's proper support for both.

I double-dog dare you to do any significant photo editing using only the keyboard.

These days, I'm doing all my editing with image-magick from the commandline.

This goes back to structured vs unstructured from elsewhere in the thread. Applying most of the editing tools is unstructured, but navigating the UI is structured.

As a result, I'm very fast at navigating menus and switching tools in my program of choice (GIMP), because those are rapid keypresses rather than forced mouse clicks. It's just so much faster to click Alt+I > S, type a few numbers, hit Tab a couple times, and enter (well, Space usually), than it is to navigate with the mouse to the Scale Image drop-down, put my hands back on the keys to type numbers in, and then switch back to the mouse to hit OK. Ctrl+Q is much easier and faster than clicking the Selection Editor button. Alt+L > T > 9 is the quickest and simplest way of rotating the current layer - a more mouse-based UI might even refuse to give me a 90-degree option and instead force me into manual control. And of course, keeping a hand on the keyboard so it can quickly type a key or shift-key is much faster and more accurate than having to mouse over to the Toolbox to select a tool.

You really need to learn how to use a tablet.

Or a 2-in-1 device with a touchscreen and a pen (e.g. Surface).

The non-graphical tablets with pens are really a different type of interaction, and one that supersedes keyboard + mouse for light graphics. Using one hand with the pen for pointer input + another hand for touch input is really powerful. Moving around, zooming, or rotating things on the screen is easier done with a hand. And a wheel menu (context or otherwise) really starts to shine with a pen.

I wish more software actually supported this. I currently own such a device (a Dell), and I'm searching for software that can utilize touch+pen input to full extent, but there aren't many programs that can.

Pretty late but a lot of significant photo editing is done with one hand on the keyboard for shortcuts and the other hand on the wacom pen, no mouse involved.

Nobody has an aversion to the keyboard, they just disagree with the "people that use mice are idiots" crowd.

Considering that the Qwerty keyboard was deliberately designed to be slow, then yes, I do have an aversion to the keyboard.

I'm a Pom (British/Australian) living in Germany, so most keyboards in shared locations are unusable for me. Using other people's computers is a massive pain as my carefully-learned muscle memory is now actively stopping me from pushing the right keys.

I keep looking at Dvorak or a chord input device, but I know that if I get used to that then I'll have to carry one around with me always so that I can plug it in to whatever computer I'm using at that point. This doesn't seem practical.

I'd love another input option. One that was actually designed for humans to communicate fast with.

I use Dvorak on a Kinesis and typing on a regular keyboard isn’t a big deal. It’s surprising, but learning Dvorak or another keyboard doesn’t really make you worse at the original.

It did for me when I tried it.

you're lucky. I couldn't even use Vim because anytime I entered text in any other setting, my muscle memory slapped ESC as soon as I was done entering. On most computerised forms, that's a bad thing. I still find myself hitting ESC when I've finished a code edit, and I'm not even using Vim any more.

I don't want to know what my muscle memory would do if it got used to a Dvorak keyboard.

> Considering that the Qwerty keyboard was deliberately designed to be slow

Hasn't that origin story been debunked?

e.g. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...

> Considering that the Qwerty keyboard was deliberately designed to be slow

No, this is a myth that doesn't become more true just because many people perpetuate it without question.

QWERTY was designed to be as fast as possible for the first data entry jobs at the first companies that adopted typewriters and went through a couple iterations based on feedback of these first customers.

Is QWERTY optimal? No. But it's good enough that learning an alternative layout like Dvorak for months may cost you more of your lifetime than you'll ever get back by typing minimally faster(not to mention such a switch would be more costly with every single keyboard shortcut you've memorised so far).

Either way if you are waiting for a better alternative to become the standard so you don't need to carry your own keyboard you're going to need a lot of patience.

Qwerty was designed to cut down on jams caused by adjacent typewriter arms, which generally were adjacent keys.

While not designed for best human use, it's not completely terrible.

Azerty vs Qwerty verus Qwertz is a different issue entirely.

Isn't it more akin to playing piano (being like using a mouse), reaching for octaves, vs. playing, say, a saxophone where you press a "meta" key to change octave (and alter breathing, but that's just a limitation of the analogy) being more like using a keyboard?

The problems I have with keyboard are usually discoverability.

Nah, they're both like keyboards. Playing piano is like typing. Changing octave with a "meta" key is like using Meta (Alt) on your keyboard.

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