Emacs and the mouse: A modest defense of the rodent

Related: https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/ - "The widely cited studies on mouse vs. keyboard efficiency are completely bogus."

EDIT:

More on topic: I tried, but the percentage of times when my stroke wasn't recognized was way too high for me. There's a customization variable that could help, but I have enough programmable buttons on my physical mouse[1] to get by with just them:

    - scroll up/down
    - tilt wheel left/right
    - two small buttons for back/forward to the left of the left button
    - dpi change button under thumb (can be made to send other events with Solaar)

So I can directly bind 5-7 commands that will work every time without risking the "stroke was not recognized" problem. And that's without modifiers and clever hacks like mouse3.el, which allow for (almost) directly exposing even more functionality. Strokes/gestures are slower and less reliable than this. They probably can be helpful in some configurations (I wonder if Emacs on Android would be the perfect use case?), but I don't feel the need for them in my setup.

[1] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/mice/mx-ergo-wireles...

> Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.

> The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

I like to think that the goal of optimizing my editing workflow is not (necessarily) making it objectively faster, but rather making it feel faster so that the frustrations are removed and the experience is smoother.

This is, of course, my entirely subjective take.

This doesn't resonate with me because I grew up with mouse and gesture support and I left for a reason.

Now I guess I need to say this, if you find yourself intimidated or put-off by keyboard-centric workflows THATS FINE. I think the real problem is we assume that keyboard workflows are necessary for mastery, especially when we first start, and so people get all defensive about not jumping into vim/emacs. On the flip side, if you did embrace this way of life and actually do look down on people who don't, stop, you're making it harder for everyone and giving us keyboard warriors a bad name.

I got the bug after years of playing sc2. It gave me an innate sense for how to do a series of actions quickly and mechanically while leaving my mind free to do more strategic thinking. I just can't get enough of this mindset which is why I try to cram it into every app I can.

But I'm having to come to terms with the fact that new generations of programmers don't know how to touch type, let alone adopt emacs or neovim. Hell, people are starting to use chatgpt to just yell at their computer to create code with their damn voice, which would make keyboard-centric workflows akin to writing in cursive, an overly-specialized skill that will be seen as increasingly obsolete as new forms of communication overtake them.

I won't lie, that makes me sad on a level, but it would be unrealistic of me to expect others to go through the same training I did when it simply isn't as relevant to their lives.

Something that seems to permeate keyboard vs mouse debates is an unsaid assumption that some kind of robotic consistency/purity is the goal.

I don't buy that at all when a human being is involved. There are tons of actions I know perfectly well how to achieve with either the keyboard or the mouse, and which of those I unconsciously choose at a given instant varies based on what else I'm thinking about, precisely how I'm physically positioned, and just how I'm feeling. There no problem with that.

One pretty neat Emacs trick is to bind mouse click events to toggle multiple cursors. Here's for example how to use Ctrl+Mouse_Click with evil-mc (vanilla Emacs equivalent is mc/toggle-cursor-on-click)

    (with-eval-after-load 'evil-mc
        (global-set-key (kbd "C-<down-mouse-1>") 'evil-mc-toggle-cursor-on-click))

You would just click, click, click while holding Ctrl and then you can edit a bunch of things simultaneously.

Contrary to what the Dan Luu article says, I see a very specific detail from Bruce Tognazzini that takes the mystery out of the claim that $50MM in research says the mouse is faster. Once you go past the expired certificate warning you can see it too at https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

It's in the context of inconsistent keybindings across different apps, and the pertinent detail is, "It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press".

Contexts where you instantly know the keys to press are different from what the $50MM research studied.

Some of those mouse (touchpad for me) gestures could be useful, like splitting a buffer in two. If it's the current buffer, C-x 2 and C-x 3 feel faster. If it's another one probably the gesture is faster. They are also easy to remember.

Some other gestures are puzzling, like

> Middle click to paste a link from the clipboard. (This is only for clarity, it’s unrelated to the actual action.) Then use a mouse gesture to git-clone from that link to a prespecified directory.

I wonder how many times per day one has to clone repositories before one could remember that the gesture for that exists and how to perform it in the right way. It takes training.

I clone repositories not every month, maybe I even spent at least one full year without cloning anything (long running projects.) But OK, I'm sure there are people that have to work with many different repositories at least every week.

I’ve been studying this for my research. The current conclusion so far, related to perception of flow, is that with keyboard interactions, you’re consistently and progressively closer to your goal. As for the mouse, regardless of timing to achieve the goal, there’s generally a lot of waste, that is, the energy spent does not reflect a step towards the intended goal, because you are moving into space generically and non-deterministically. Mouse interactions are prone to failure/cancellation, since the goal is achieved only at the last instant, one diversion and you are back to square one. Hence the class of actions that must be faster on the mouse are the ones where the goal is immediately and progressively achieved by spatial input, such as scrolling, drawing, etc. since energy is directly translated into effects. Mouse is obviously suited for continuous input, and keyboard for discrete inputs. For all classes of actions apt to be broken into discrete steps, keyboard control will provide consistent and reproducible results. Further, those chunks can be optimized and compressed with mnemonics, whereas mouse actions cannot be compressed. There’s no one versus the other, as both devices are complimentary. With that said, performing discrete interactions with the mouse is a poor use of the tool, regardless of anyone’s preferences. That’s a fact.

All makes sense; I went all in on the "no mouse" idea for a while and eventually came back.

I suspect that, despite it all, there's something very useful about being able to see a bit of text and to physically "go to it" like one might with a pen or a highlighter, that for many has less overhead than trying to "think your way towards describing where it is?"

When I started using emacs about 15 years ago, I turned off all possible mouse interactions in my config, to force myself to learn and use the keyboard efficiently.

A few months ago, I redid my emacs config, and decided to allow mouse interaction again. Honestly, besides occasionally scrolling in a long document, I haven't felt the need to use the mouse at all. The keyboard just works.

In Emacs specifically..

A large part of the emphasis of "keep your hands on the keyboard" is aimed at beginners. Well, at least in the case of Vim bindings. Learning such keybindings has a steep cost; while learning them, it's always going to be more practical to just use a mouse. But, once you learn them, then it's often quicker.

For keyboard-driven programs, I'd say a (well-configured) Emacs is the gold standard.

OP makes the suggestion that using the "strokes" package functionality will have some advantages over keyboard binding. -- If it works for the user, sure. But, I'd worry about stroke recognition.. and it doesn't seem to me that memorizing a mouse stroke is going to be easier than memorising some key sequence.

In Emacs, if there's some command I want to run, I'll invoke the "execute-command" with "SPC-:", find the command, then look at the keybinding next to that so I can rehearse using the keybinding.

> Window selection is a natural extension of basic mouse usage. Resizing windows is a snap.

I don't think I can remember the last time I needed to resize a window in Emacs. I think. Also selecting window with a mouse simply would never work for me, because I need to select them by title in most cases. This claim OP makes is just absurd. If OP was honest, then they'd wrote "in some very special and simple cases, which don't happen in practice" using mouse for selecting and resizing windows may be faster." Which doesn't have the same ring to it, obviously.

> and drag and drop support

I don't feel like I'm missing something if I don't have this feature. Whenever I'm faced with this feature in other programs, I'm very much annoyed I cannot accomplish the action associated with this interface in a different way (unless performing the action precisely is somehow rewarded, as in maybe it's a part of the game where you have to prove you can do things very precisely)

> are very intuitive

I don't care. The point of using professional tools is that you learn and practice how to use them. Intuitive is for buy-in, it's not for being good at.

> The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Did this measurement incorporate precision? I seriously doubt that. Most importantly, mouse is only a solution for things that are or can be made visible on the screen, and it also requires paying attention to what's going on on the screen. You cannot use your mouse while at the same time looking away from the screen (which I often do), or by trying to access functionality that isn't already on the screen (which is very often what I need to do, like, accessing a particular buffer, or calling a particular command).

In fact, mouse is so rarely a solution for anything I need to do during editing that even if it was faster for a very few things it can do, I still wouldn't care because I'd value uniformity of interface over negligible speedups in very few cases.

I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to be meaningfully limited by their typing speed in any task but data entry.

As others already hinted at, pretty much all the arguments against using the mouse for some things break down when you have a touchpad.

In most cases windows resizing, moving and usually selecting and scrolling (with chiral scrolling) are faster and more convenient by an order of magnitude.

And reaching out to a (central) touchpad takes about as much effort as reaching any keyboard key.

People should really give them a chance; unfortunately many are mislead by the Emacs and Vim's docs, but when they were written touchpads didn't even exist.

Everyone should try Acme for a month and then go back to your favourite editor.

http://acme.cat-v.org/

It's 2023 and people are still arguing about whether they should use a 1960s UI technology with emacs or if the 1902 keyboard + teletype interface is enough.

I mouse in vim to either scroll or move the cursor exactly where I'm looking*

* Which is often not where I need the cursor to be for some vim commands

> Even so, I use the mouse frequently because it’s often the best way to select text, images and links, do graphical work, and to interact with (both simple and complex) GUI software.

“Select text” seems (IMO) like something where these microbenchmarks have an obvious flaw. If you set up an artificial test like select a continuous line of text from an arbitrarily formatted file, the mouse might be better. But we’re programmers, right? We make our code nice and tidy. Usually I want to select a whole line in a file that has line numbers. So for line 10, 10ggyy in vim. That’s pretty quick.

Or I want to select the first couple columns of multiple rows. Ctrl-v, repeat j as many times as you’d like. I actually have no idea how to do that with a mouse.

Anything more complicated, I begin to wonder if we want a macro, find-replace, or something else.

A mouse might be better for interacting with GUIs and images but those things simply shouldn’t be done. Text is the correct way to communicate.

I have to give a +1 on this article. I'm not a big mouse gesture fan or user but I do agree with the mindset to use best tool available for the task. What 'best' means is subjective but I like discovering new tools or options I didn't know I have. Thanks!

I love this quote so much:

” We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding. – Bruce Tognazzini ”

The question one needs to ask from oneself - am I a poweruser or do I just enjoy yak shaving.

I used to configure everything ”so it’s exactly right for me”. At some point I switched to mostly using default options for everything, and if given the option, choosing what ever had best default options (for myself). I like my computer use much more nowadays as stuff tends to ”just work” and I can focus on actually just doing stuff.

Of course I always used a mouse with Emacs, if not I could have used vim.

It's not about keyboard vs mouse. The most important thing is that you use both hands. Imagine how crap and limited you would be playing the piano with one hand. All keyboard use is assumed to be using two hands. The slow mouse usage is when you just use the mouse and leave the other hand quite literally on the table. But combined keyboard and mouse usage is by far the fastest way to do certain things. I'm not sure text editing is one of them, though.

mousing is profoundly good if you let it into your life as a programmer, but for me it had the knock-on effect of making programming at a desktop unappealing. i find the ergonomics of alternating between mouse and keyboard that much better on a laptop, whether it's subconsciously just thumbing the trackpad for small motions, or moving my index finger a mere 1.5 keys to the left to smoosh a trackpoint.

this must be the impulse behind the yoda and similar[1], but these still don't do it for me: i could not comfortably daily drive anything that solders into a cherry mx footprint, and any mech switches i like would demand a costly, time-consuming from-scratch build.

some mac accessory makers have put out a wrist rest that mounts a magic trackpad in front of an apple keyboard, which sounds like it could be really cool adapted to fit a “proper keyboard”, but user testimonies are that the lack of palm rejection drives them nuts.

for reference, a trackpad to the right of the keyboard defeats the purpose from my point of view, as if i'm going to perform a whole-arm motion to access a different input device, i may as well have my hand land on my trusty wireless mouse: if it's good enough for getting headshots it's good enough for selecting text, plus i get proper mouse chording, which i must admit to missing over in trackpad land.

so, laptop it is. here's hoping my spine doesn't hate me when i'm fifty.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/VBk868o.jpeg

The real question is, does the quickness of using the keyboard alone make up for all the time you've spent learning emacs

The magic of Emacs is that you can set it up the way you like. On mousing, it depends. Faster in some cases for making changes on editing and browsing the web in eww if you don't care about ctrl-s.

This is why I always disliked helm. Ivy never forced you to go all in keyboard, and supports the mouse quite well whenever you decide you want to use it.

one of the better emacs+mouse actions for me is rectangle select with C+M+'hold left button and select'

Today mouse is 2 different things: actual mouse or trackpad.