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Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

I can't agree with the `2. Don't use the mouse'. Unless Emacs' mouse support is completely broken (doubtful), mouse is only going to increase productiveness.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mouse_vs._keyboard/ind...

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I have an immediate, almost visceral disagreement with the suggestion that a mouse is more efficient, but I may be wrong. For sake of argument: I think the "just pointing vs. using the keyboard and getting more thought involved about structure disrupts the sense of time" argument may have something to it. Still, using a keyboard well counterbalances this by being able to take advantage of greater structure - I very frequently use elaborate keyboard macros, for example, and the mouse doesn't have any clear way to say, "Ok, the thing I just did, apply that in a batch to the rest of those that look like a C function prototype." The mouse is more immediate, but you can do more powerful manipulation with the keyboard if you know the program's keyboard shortcuts, etc. (That's not necessarily a good trade-off for many kinds of programs, but for a text editor / IDE, it's probably worthwhile.)

While there have been some attempts to do that with mice (such as mouse gestures), by design, mice are about position, changes of position, with a few buttons as flags. There aren't enough distinctive signals.

Also: The Emacs mouse support is not great. It probably hasn't been a high priority.

"Also: The Emacs mouse support is not great. It probably hasn't been a high priority."

In what way? It's certainly as good as it is in any other editor, with the addition of several very Emacs-esque mouse-driven commands. For example, right click marks the region from point to the click point and saves it in the kill rin (like M-w); double right click kills that region. Using M- does the same, but modifies the secondary selection. Using C- with the mouse pops up several useful context menus. Try playing around with C-h k <mouse button> in various contexts.

I can understand what you're saying, and I agree, but I think you miss the idea of abandoning the mouse. You're not doing it with intent to lose the marginal benefit of the mouse, rather, you need to give it up in order to become more efficient and familiar with the keybindings.

Thus, once you are no longer a beginner (the guide's target audience) you may graduate to keyboard+mouse. I don't use emacs or vi(m) or anything truly in line with them (textmate is my closest) but I have no doubt that someone who uses only the keyboard for three months and then reintroduces the mouse will show a greater capability with the tools than the same person spending the same time using both keyboard and mouse.

Depends on what you are doing. If you want to kill a sexp, the keyboard is going to be faster. If you want to kill a random block of text that has no structure, then sure, the mouse is going to be faster.

Guess which programmers usually do.

If you're programming Perl, then it's going to be "kill a random block of text that has no structure."

Sorry, couldn't resist. :)

Most language modes in emacs redefine the concept of "sexp", "sentence", "word", etc. so that "kill-sexp" and "kill-sentence" and "kill-word" work as you'd expect. cperl-mode is no exception. (If it is, submit a bug report at http://github.com/jrockway/cperl-mode !)

You've gotta put the blast shield down before you can begin to sense the Force.

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