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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

A mouse or trackpad is a 2D input device. Unless you have a 2D input problem (dragging nodes in a graph, drawing a free form curve, selecting a point on a map…) then it was never the right tool to begin with.

Navigating discrete UI elements or making simple UI actions of the kind that can be mapped to keyboard input - that’s easily doable with a keyboard. Occasionally it’s just a tad harder with keyboard than with mouse (web pages are notoriously useless with keyboard) but it’s possible.

I wouldn’t last a day without going crazy without a mouse though. People who say they have gone mouseless also seem to argue they have zero 2D input and basically use text and ignore all other workloads. That’s not exactly solving the problem (not that I think it can be solved any better than just using a mouse!)

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> Unless you have a 2D input problem…

Are not most GUIs are a 2D input mechanism?

Sort of (depends on terminology): A form is a set of controls laid out in 2D. But they are ordered and discrete so you can just ignore their positioning in x,y and instead navigate in their order instead (e.g tabbing through controls) making it a 1D input!

By “2D input” in this context I mean input where there isn’t also such a navigation option and you must input one or more coordinates and there is no way to enter the coordinates as numbers. For example the input surface (image) in a drawing program like Microsoft paint.

Random access vs. sequential access. Guess which one is more efficient?

I think you're equating "random" with keyboard and "sequential" with mouse, but I also think of keyboard as "serial" and keyboard + mouse as "parallel".

I know my conclusion from your comment is supposed to be "keyboard is faster", but I'm not sure that's true. https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

No, I am equating mouse with random access (can click on any of the 2D points), and keyboard with sequential (need to tab through form components) ;-)

You would have to claw my trackpad from my cold dead hands.

Check out the responses to CharlesW's comment in this thread for more on that link.

It depends on the GUI.

For photo editing, the interactions with the photo directly require fine control in two dimensions with the cursor.

Many GUIs are just interfaces to modal switches, or a categorical variable with usually a finite number of options.

yes. But text UIs are, arguably, infinite-dimensional (because language is). Thus a 2D input problem is a severely limited particular case, that allows for very specific and useful optimizations helped by a mouse, pad or trackball.

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