Specially since that on my hacker circle of Demoscene, during the 16 bit days, we were mostly on Atari and Amiga systems, then we had plenty of mouse time, and no one ever stop to wonder we weren't hackers because we had mices.
This is not about a hype or "looking cool". Mouse and GUIs are faster and more ergonomic for exploratory activities ("how do I do X" for a new task, skimming a document or folder, etc), while keyboard (keyboard shortcuts, command line) is faster for routine, repeatable tasks. Web browsing is full of the latter.
I personally strongly prefer the keyboard and find it exhausting to reach for the mouse all the time, but it's a matter of personal preference. I don't think less of someone when I see they heavily use the mouse when programming, though in my opinion they are missing out.
My hand is usually already on the mouse. Switching apps, scrolling text etc.
I started on PC-DOS and mainframes so was originally all keyboard, but having mouse made things much easier for me.
Now don't get me started on gestures - I can never remember any. - Which might be some of the reason to use mice I can't remember a lot of keyboard shortcuts let me have discoverable menus etc. Pit Smalltalk did not become mainstream.
Do you have a solution?
I'm stuck with native solutions, otherwise I gather this can be fixed with AHK. I'm interested in what you use either way.
I notice you can also reorder the desktops: right click (while holding win+tab), select "move left". Maybe it will then boot into whichever one's leftmost.
You can take a look at it here: http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?quickrun
Be aware tho, it looks ugly in Win10 and onward.
When using Linux my hand is almost never on the mouse and I groan when I have to do it. My terminal, browser experience, mp3 player, IRC client, etc, are all usable with only a key board. Even rearranging windows is just a keyboard action.
Even on windows, I can't remember the last time I switched windows with a mouse instead of alt tab. Scrolling text is just pressing j in vimium or even in vanilla chrome just pressing spacebar. If your hand is on the mouse that much you're probably not being optimal
I'm aware of about four models of standalone keyboard with it available, but that's trivial even compared to the bazillion keyboards with touchpads for couch typing.
I think that’s mostly what it is. A keyboard (and a bunch of memorizing), gives mastery over the applications UI.
Very few people master shortcuts that require three key chords or more.
It's all about investing a little time to learn something that dramatically speeds up your workflow. A mainstream user has no interest in this even if they work with the computer all day. Hackers as computer enthusiasts do.
When you worked on those early computers you either had to be an enthusiast or be forced by an employer to use them :)
GUIs are great for infrequent tasks. TUIs for efficiency at frequent ones.
As mentioned, I started into computing when TUIs were the only affordable computing model.
There is no magic to me about whatever greatness of TUI and CLI.
Arguing with them is like arguing with audiophiles.
When I press F12, does an inspector open? Where does it open? When I select some words, how do I send them to a new tab in YouTube, Amazon, Google or Stack Overflow? How do I open all the links which are within a selected rectangle in new background tabs? Or use uBlock Origin's element picker?
I'm pretty sure this browser is super fast and all is super optimized and a top tier workflow, but mostly in certain limited scenarios.
What did you think of the demos? The sorts of things you mentioned seem like things doable in NYXT based on the demos, possibly even the exact sort of stuff they are trying to make possible. It looks like it's basically Common Lisp with a web browser attached, which suggests it should be fairly moldable too. I have not seriously used it myself though, so I can't say for sure what the limits are.
Not necessarily with Nyxt or keyboard of course.
This is kind of why it works. In vim you spend most of your time in normal mode, reading, moving around, making quick edits. It takes good advantage of the whole keyboard even when you're not writing new text. I use qutebrowser, which has default vim-style bindings for everything and an emphasis on the keyboard. It works very well.
If I'm programming and want to look up something in the docs, then it's annoying to switch to the mouse and then back, but I pretty much have to with traditional browser UI. (Or tab through a million links to find the right button to click, use cursor keys to scroll, etc.)
Similarly, if I'm just scrolling around with the mouse, then I should be able to do everything that I can with the keyboard (apart from text input). The context menu is good for discoverability, but being context-dependent makes it impossible to rely on muscle memory.
you can miss more easily with a mouse and have to adjust the position of the cursor to line up on two axis before any action
The "line up the two axis" thing is immaterial, and has no practical impact on actual productivity.
“Line up the two axes” was kind of a silly way to put it, but the position you aim your cursor varies quite often, but where you type on a keyboard doesn’t.
You can develop muscle memory for the latter. It’s why hotkeys are so widely used.
When using a mouse you need to completely move your hand to another device, and aim that device at an arbitrary position.
With a keyboard the positions you move your fingers are fixed and because of that, you can develop muscle memory and type very quickly without thinking about where to move your fingers. It’s called “touch typing.”
There’s no such thing for using a mouse since the target position of the mouse movement can vary wildly from website to website and can vary based on the position of a given window.
Using a mouse is natural as in intuitive. You don’t need to really tech someone to use a mouse. It’s easy in that way.
But that’s not the same as muscle memory. Using my hands is very natural, but when learning guitar, I still need to be conscious of what position my hand is going to be in. After a while, since my hand is constantly going to the exact same position, I develop muscle memory and no longer need to be conscious of where my hand is going.
I feel like I shouldn’t need to explain muscle memory with analogy.
A mouse (or rather, a floating cursor) is often a much more efficient way to get your cursor in position than slamming your arrow or hjkl keys multiple dozens of times.
And yeah, of course. Most people who use keyboard based workflows dont just use hjkl to move a cursor around. In vim, for example, there are many more text-centric ways of moving around a document.
Using a keyboard is generally much faster. Try using your daily code editor without any hot keys at all. No F5, no Ctrl-s, none of that.
Uh, what? I have my touchpad tuned so that one swipe from top left to bottom right is exactly equal to going from the top left to bottom right of my display. And aside from that, how do you think people play FPS games, that they think about every mouse movement and then do it?
> Most people who use keyboard based workflows dont just use hjkl to move a cursor around.
> Try using your daily code editor
One of the few usecases where you can do that, and in general is extremely heavily biased towards keyboard use.
Having a touchpad or mouse is great because it is adaptable and versatile. It doesn’t require the application developer to have accommodated every step a keyboard user wants to optimize for. Not to mention there is no “quickly” using your keyboard with one hand if you constantly need to hold modifier keys :)
> Using a keyboard is generally much faster.
That was my point, it is until it isn’t. On any application without Vim or EMacs bindings I’ll happily be leaping over hundreds of lines of text with one or two swipes whilst you are sitting there, going taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap with horrid inefficiency.
I’d be doing search and land exactly where I need to be. For each important operation, there’s always a more efficient operations as shortcuts are composable in a way pointing is not.
I think that FPS players are conscious of where they are aiming. They don’t just automatically move their mouse in the exact same way to hit every enemy on screen.
There may be some specific movements, like swiping or turning 180 degrees which have a specific motion (or gesture) related to it, but that isn’t the same as aiming, which you can’t memorize as where you aim is different every time depending on your targets position and movement.
> Not to mention there is no “quickly” using your keyboard with one hand if you constantly need to hold modifier keys :)
Yes there is :)
> On any application without Vim or EMacs bindings I’ll happily be leaping over hundreds of lines of text with one or two swipes whilst you are sitting there.
I’m sorry, but this is a bad argument. Obviously is software isn’t made to support keyboard centric use, it will not be great to use it only with a keyboard.
Imagine if you were writing a book, but your software wasn’t made with keyboard support. You’d need to use the mouse to click every letter. Or one where each clickable button is buried in >3 layers of dropdown menus. That would be equally terrible.
If you have an application optimized for keyboard interaction, it will be faster (tho less intuitive) to interact with it than one which is optimized for mouse movements.
There is a good compromise between speed of use and intuitive usability which is mouse-centric with hot keys.
But to interact as quickly as possible, you’d want to stick with one consistent input device, and motion based input devices don’t cut it.
I mean use what you want though. If you like using a mouse, use it.
There's no (or extremely little...) hype, it's just the sort of thing which starts to appear prominent in a world where conversations are driven more and more by the titles on videos and articles, rather than the other way around.
I claim that the following are all pretty factual, all at once:
1. meese can be faster and more convenient, in certain cases
2. keyboards can be faster and more convenient, in certain cases
3. what people (even the computer-savvy) are used to matters much more than what is "objectively" best or fastest or whatever
4. "hacker" is a polysemic term - playful creative norm-bending, technical mastery of some domain, making Ataris and Amigas do funny stuff it seems they shouldn't have been able to, getting access to a gaming console you weren't supposed to, solving a problem in a surprising manner, reverse engineering some game, etc
5. emacs is an empowering, wonderful text editor
6. so is (hyper/super/ultra/n/eo/) vi(m)
7. nyxt is about much more than keyboard shortcuts (Lisp, freedom, etc)
So for people of my generation, it's really only the tech savvy ones that would use key commands for anything but the most rudimentary stuff (think copy, paste, save, and print).
Thats not to say that keyboard == hacker mentality, but that a keyboard-first tool like this wouldn't really target the average consumer at this point.
Personally, it's not about what's faster - it's about switching. If my hands are already resting lightly on the keyboard, then the keyboard is faster - and vice versa.
To decrease the amount of switching I have to do, I use an extension called Vimium that quickly highlights all links with key bindings. For example "g i" automatically puts the first <input> level field into focus.