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Comment by ypeterholmes | Hacker News Reader

Mistaken premise here in my opinion:

Think about typing the character ‘a’ on a keyboard. Fast, right? Just the one keystroke. “It is fast,” Bathiche says, “if you make some certain assumptions. That the position of the letter ‘a’ is where you intended it to be, the font is the way you intended it to be, the size of the ‘a’ is what you intended it to be.” All those decisions are made before you hit the key, and you often don’t have a choice. “But with ink, you can dictate all those things, almost simultaneously as you’re writing. I can put my ‘a’ here, or here, and I can make it as big as I want, as hard as I want.”

I can type wayyy faster than I can write with a pen.

So... yeah

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His thought here resonates with me though, particularly when I'm taking the kind of notes that involve diagrams, I find that using the space I'm given exactly how I want it, whether to draw boxes with big symbols, simple graphs or sketches, is a lot quicker on paper with a pen or pencil than on a computer using a keyboard. I'm a pretty fast typer and a writer so I'll admit that there is probably some person whose speed difference is so large that this really isn't helpful, but mostly what takes up time if I want to type like a write is using the mouse to select my font size and type, click the button that tells the word processor I want to draw boxes or arrows and then drawing those boxes and arrows.

Also importantly, he admits there are many cases where you really just need a keyboard (writing a long paper, composing a tweet or comment) but I think he's right that there's also many where you really need a pen.

To preface this, I'm a mid-20s guy who grew up with a keyboard in his hands. I type absurdly faster than I write, with handwriting harder to read than a doctor's, and the idea of carrying an honest to goodness piece of paper and pen around with me seemed archaic.

Then I started my most recent job, and was provided with a Surface Pro.

I'm already well embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, and I used OneNote before, but the workflow was a minor assistance to me, and I didn't get what the big deal was. You stuck some notes in a notepad, and then you could look at them later. So what? How does this help me?

Now, though, I've got a pen. I take my surface with me to each and every meeting I go to, and it's made a world of difference to how meetings work for me. I can take notes that have more contextually appropriate information than just text, because I can scribble out a diagram of a process as it's being explained to me. If I'm leading a meeting, I'll project from my Surface and use it to whiteboard out ideas onto the projector (like a ghetto version of the Surface Hub). I'll note other people's contributions into the same document and then share out a fully editable version of that document into a team notebook.

All of these interactions feel more "natural" than the action I'm most accustomed to, which is typing, and the end result is somehow more human-friendly (despite how horrifying my handwriting is) than my previous "list of things discussed and some dot points" method of taking notes.

If the future of interaction is pen, it'll come less of a surprise to me now than it would have five years ago.

If you don't care about font and style, yes. But if the "markup" is high relative to the character count, pens win.

This is also a pronounced issue in information graphics -- the off-the-shelf stuff in Excel etc is quite limited; you can do a custom visual a lot better, easier, with a custom drawing, what is impossible or ungainly in a "smart" diagramming program.

Can you type LaTeX faster than you can write equations on a chalkboard? I can't.

I can, if I want to make sure I (or anyone) can read it back.

Exactly, it's why I still reach for a pen and pad if I know I'll have to take notes on something remotely more complex than just text. The worst feeling is to be busily typing notes only to realize you could clarify something by drawing a couple arrows or circling something.

Also, no digital task list has ever been able to replicate the satisfaction for me of writing out a to-do list with checkboxes and checking them off as I complete each task.

I can. I used to do my math homework in LaTeX. I'm not saying I did it on paper and the final stuff was written up, I mean I was thinking in LaTeX. The PDF viewer was "check what I just did mode" and the text editor was "get thoughts down" mode.

It was proof heavy so there was a lot of English anyway. Add copy/paste for derivations with a lot of shared structure and it really pulls ahead. If you define your own macros and are good enough at programming them on the fly it's a neat though dumb Lispy symbolic math tool.

Same here, I picked up LaTeX to take notes in my computer graphics class because I didn't feel like writing it (my written equations were always pretty cramped, and my handwriting is garbage) and because it was a pain to represent equations in LibreOffice (what I'd been taking notes in before).

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