Comment by Arch-TK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arch-TK | Hacker News Reader

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>big argument in favour of using mice

Yes, I am aware of Acme and Sam and I am aware that good mouse driven interfaces are faster than using keyboard driven interfaces.

I should point out that mouse driven interfaces are only better than keyboard driven interfaces when designed competently to actually take advantage of mice (e.g. acme). Text editors such as VSCode suck in comparison in terms of their mouse usage, the way Acme uses mice is worlds different from the extremely boring and inefficient use of mice that VSCode has.

That aside, the question is not if utilising a mouse well makes for a faster interface than restricting the interface to only using the keyboard. The question is if multiple-cursors are a good use of the mouse.

I'm sure there's some situations where multiple cursors are faster than using editor commands, but the point I was making is that in general I've found multiple-cursors to just be a distraction which slows me down. This might be because I don't work from a desktop and use a trackpoint, or maybe because when I do use a desktop I use a trackball. But from what I actually remember, most of my time with multiple-cursors has been spent trying to reason about how applying a certain input in 5 different places will affect the text, and then undoing mistakes. I have found the regular expressions that vim has as well as the structural regular expressions in Sam and Acme to be far better at describing operations which need to occur in multiple places.

Please do look into vim's regular expressions, there's a surprising amount of stuff that they can do which most people are not aware of.

> Please do look into vim's regular expressions

So here's an editing task. Given the following in your editing buffer,

  signed char foo;
  /* ... 10 more lines ... */
  unsigned short bar;
  /* ... 10 more lines ... */
  const char *const s = "Dennis Ritchie little-loved 'const'.";

What is the fastest sequence of vim commands to

  1. delete 'signed' from signed char foo
  2. delete 'short' from unsigned short bar
  3. delete the two occurrences of 'const' from 'const char * const s'

With VSCodium

  1. Alt-click just past the end of each of the 4 strings to be deleted.
  2. Ctrl-Backspace.
  3. Done.

This involves

1. Three keyboard keys total (Ctrl, Alt, Backspace), each pressed and released once.

2. Four mouse clicks total, plus four target aiming tasks for these clicks.

This sequence requires zero thought or planning prior to execution.

I want to see the keyboard keystroke count for your best vim sequence, which will require a pause to plan out prior to execution, whatever you come up with.

> This might be because I don't work from a desktop and use a trackpoint, or maybe because when I do use a desktop I use a trackball.

Multiple peer-reviewed human-computer interaction studies have shown that for a broad range of pointing and editing tasks the mouse is faster than touchpads, trackpoint nipples, trackballs, and pens. (I do use a pen occasionally and if not for the pressure/tilt sensitivity it would be mostly pointless.) There's no need to dig into the literature because you can just try it yourself: next time you have both a mouse and your trackpoint/trackball handy try benchmarking your performance at,

  https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/aim

There is no way you are hitting the curve peak around 400ms with a trackpoint/trackball/touchpad. There is a reason essentially all pro gamers who compete for millions in sponsorship bucks use mice instead of touchpads/trackpoints/trackballs: mice are faster. (There might be like 1 out of 1000 pros who use a trackball for Starcraft-like games, but none of them are top-ranked.)

Also try

  https://aimtrainer.io/

I agree VSCodium is not as cool as Acme, but it is nevertheless very efficient or I wouldn't use it over Vim, Emacs, or Acme.

If you do not personally like mice or mouse driven multiple-cursors that's cool, enjoying the journey is often more important than getting to the destination as fast as possible.

But I do claim that if and when text editing competitions for prize money are held, those who use mouse-driven multiple selection will be at a decisive competitive advantage over those who don't. This is just a claim which I cannot prove until such competitions are held. And, again, if a mouse makes you less happy than something slower, then the tortoise beats the hare, so to speak.

>Example involving signed, etc.

I am aware that mouse based use of multiple cursors can be faster in some situations. But I would highly question if the example you gave isn't unique and contrived. If I was performing a local refactoring task like the one you described, I certainly wouldn't read the code first and then buffer up all the disparate editing tasks which I have accumulated. Especially since mentally I would have to categorise them into a category suitable for this kind of editing task. I would most certainly perform the refactoring tasks as I encountered them, navigating with `h`, `j`, `k`, `l`, and `w` to run `daw`. Moreover, if I were using a mouse based text editor, I would be double-clicking each instance and hitting backspace as I scanned the text. If this was a global refactoring effort, I wouldn't be using vim, I would be using more advanced language aware tools to perform whatever changes I needed (although it wouldn't be too difficult to turn this into a globally executable regular expression). In fact, double clicking and backspacing is not really particularly slower than the action you described and is certainly more flexible in that you can perform other edits (ones which may not be describable as whole-word-deletions) in between.

Realistically, I am not that interested in counting clicks and keystrokes and more interested in effort. It's not really effort to perform a refactoring task where you edit as you read. Not something I care that much about trying to optimise. I care more about cases where there's multiple very similar editing tasks which need to be repeated across a set of similar lines. In these cases, the edit operation is usually more than just "delete a word" and the number of impacted lines is more than 4. In these cases the mental effort of trying to think of how to perform the operation without misaligning things, accidentally going too far or using the wrong edit command. Especially in more modern neovim, there's even a preview for what's happening. Even without the preview, it's trivial to apply an edit, see there was a mistake, undo, modify the operations and reapply it. This is much better than performing a multi-cursor edit, realising there was a mistake and at best having to reapply all the commands after the mistake and at worst having to start from scratch.

>Multiple peer-reviewed human-computer interaction studies have shown that for a broad range of pointing and editing tasks the mouse is faster than touchpads, trackpoint nipples, trackballs, and pens. (I do use a pen occasionally and if not for the pressure/tilt sensitivity it would be mostly pointless.) There's no need to dig into the literature because you can just try it yourself: next time you have both a mouse and your trackpoint/trackball handy try benchmarking your performance at,

I am aware of the fact that the mouse is a far better aiming tool than a trackpad or trackpoint or trackball. The problem is not the aiming, as I said, but rather the mental effort required to translate complex editing tasks into multiple-simultaneous edits. At best it's no more difficult than translating a complex editing task into an expression, at worst it's more difficult.

>If you do not personally like mice or mouse driven multiple-cursors that's cool, enjoying the journey is often more important than getting to the destination as fast as possible.

I never said I didn't like mice, I said that multiple cursors are a gimmick which is less efficient than the same operation performed with other tools.

> I said that multiple cursors are a gimmick which is less efficient

My Dear Dude, you are surely aware that computer editors are Religion among programmers, that vi vs. emacs, tabs vs. spaces, etc., have been fiercely debated for decades and will continue to be fiercely debated for decades to come. Thus, like all matters of politics and religion, if you are going to insult the Editor Religion of your fellow programmer and call it a gimmick, you might do well to at least accept the challenge when foul is cried and the gauntlet is thrown down demanding a scorable, quantifiable, objective, numerical measure of your performance claim that settles the question as fact rather than opinion.

But you would do better still to refrain from insults like 'gimmick', especially when the programmer whose favored multi-cursor feature you are insulting has demonstrated a deep interest in the history of computer editors, naming out ed/vi/vim/emacs/Sam/Acme/VSCodium, etc., and fully understands how to do ':%s/foo/bar/gc' in vim and the more powerful things documented by ':h :s' within vim and the even more powerful things yet in Acme involving the 'x' and 'X' commands but despite all this has found that multi-cursor can usually finish the edit before even half of that ':s///' command can be typed or a suitable regular expression mentally devised that gobbles the correct substrings on the correct lines without accidentally gobbling incorrect substrings on incorrect lines or incorrect substrings on correct lines or correct substrings on incorrect lines.

The editing task you set is admirably met with VSCodium, indeed, but the task itself seems irrelevant to real coding. In what circumstance do you see that three disparate changes of that nature all need to be made? In reality, you would think about and act upon each in turn. In Vim, I would use db and . and . after navigating to the necessary places, perhaps using search. At all times, I would a perfectly content vim user.

(But yes, I’m sure there are plenty of situations where mouse and multi-cursor make a great approach.)

I look forward to seeing international text editing competitions appear on YouTube!

> In reality, you would think about and act upon each in turn

Here's a real example from real coding I was doing, then:

  color.r = 42;
  color.g = 42;
  color.b = 42;

I want to bump the 'r' and 'b' from 42 up to 255 but leave 'g' alone. So I,

  1. Alt-click after the two 42's I want to change
  2. Ctrl-Backspace, type '255'
  3. Done

With a vim I could

  1. Use '/42<RET>' or '?42<RET>' to search towards a 42 I want to change
  2. Use 'n' or 'N' command to skip the 42 I don't want to change (possibly)
  3. Use 'cw' followed by '255<ESC>' to change the first 42
  4. Use 'n' or 'N' to get to the next 42, skipping the 42 I don't want to change
  5. Use '.' to repeat the 'cw255<ESC>'

Alternatively with vim

  1. Use ':%s/= 42/= 255/gc' to query replace the right occurrences
  2. Answer 'y' or 'n' for each occurrence
  3. Still requires more keystrokes, time, and thought than VSCodium

It's funny all these posts presuming that multi-cursor is a gimmick only used by idiots who don't know how to use regular expression query replace and the vim '.' command. Yeah, I know how to use those, and multi-cursor is often faster. And VSCodium has a powerful multi-file query-replace that is faster to learn than the equivalent vim/emacs/grep/sed.

Yep, sure, and if that kind of code change was a frequent experience then I can imagine myself thinking multi-cursors would pay their way. As it is, I’d be perfectly happy using hjkl (because the change sites are so close) and cw and . and not for a second thinking my editing experience was suffering.

However, your comments will cause me to take a good look now at VSCodium and https://github.com/mg979/vim-visual-multi

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