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Comment by felxh | Hacker News Reader

isn't it "keystrokes make you believe you get you there faster, but you actually don't"?

I believe those studies were done with non-experts. Editors like vi and emacs are expert-systems: the upfront cost to learning how to use them is high, but once you pay that cost, you can be extremely efficient in them. I've used vi (well, vim, but just about anyone who uses "vi" is really using vim) as my primary editor for... eight years now. I feel far more comfortable in it than in editors that expect me to do mouse-and-keyboard inputs. I am, however, not a master. If you've ever seen vi or emacs masters write or edit code, it's clear they are faster than they could be if they were in a mouse-and-keyboard interface.

The key thing I noticed in the relative study is also that they said people experienced literal amnesia about the additional time required to choose a shortcut.

I'd be interested not only in a better study of the effect of expertise as well as looking at the effect of this "amnesia" on productivity. Even if it takes me longer to do a task in Emacs, that amnesia suggests that the interface is less distracting, which might be far more valuable than speed.

what study?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657135

Absolutely agree. The comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek anyways. Also, not having to switch applications is a great time saver of course. By the way, there are also great apps like Bowtie or Coversutra that add global shortcuts to control iTunes

That study was done in 1989, without experts, before standardized keyboard shortcuts, and in a lab setting rather than actual usage. I really doubt its relevance today, and I'd like to see an updated look at it. I don't think it should be cited as often as it is.

Reference: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

I'm surprised A) anyone takes that too seriously in the past 10+ years and B) there haven't been more current studies.

Regardless of what the studies say, I often get comments from 'average' users about how fast I type and work. It's all keyboard shortcuts. I remember first seeing a guy using the tab-complete stuff in a shell - I was shocked, because I just thought he was typing fast at first, then he showed me the tab key use. My life hasn't been the same since.

By comparison, when I watch other people use a computer ('average' people), it's like I can watch their thought process as they grab for the mouse, move it around, the sloowly start moving it to a menu, then they click around and move the mouse over each selection, pausing, then moving on. It's painful to watch, and often seems to happen in slow motion.

So... keep the studies going on. Until they study power keyboard users against power mouse users, my money's on the keyboard.

That depends on how many keystrokes it takes compared to the equivalent mouse actions. `c3E` is faster than moving you hand to the mouse, highlighting three words of text that you want to replace, and moving your hand back to the keyboard.

Assuming ViTunes uses a similar set of actions to play music, I could easily see it being a faster way to find and play the songs you want to listen to.

How does this compare to something like Alfred, where you hit something like option-spacebar, type "itunes uprising" and hit enter to start playing it?

Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of as I slice and dice in vim. But short of recording an editing session for an hour, making note of the things I actually edit, and then trying it with both keyboard/mouse and vim a few times each, I'm not sure how to empirically determine which is faster for me.

Also, a lot of people compare it to "moving your hand allll the wayyy over to the mouse and back", but I do a lot of coding on my laptop, actually, with my trackpad just inches away from the home row.

I could potentially even learn to use the trackpad with my thumb without even leaving the homerow. I wonder if anyone uses it that way?

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