As someone that started in computing when affordable computing was all about keyboard, and mices only existed in computers with prices similar to buying a car or a mortgage, I don't get the hype of keyboard == hacker mentality.
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.
>I don't get the hype of keyboard == hacker mentality.
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.
Browsing is mainly of exploration (e.g. reading) then data entry (which does require a keyboard but all on one page no scrolling) and much less repeatable tasks.
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.
Thats interesting. Im using GUI Windows OS, but im very heavy keyboard user, utilizing shortcuts and alt+tab for windows switching. I barely even use start
or desktop to start most common apps I use. I wrote myself QuickRun tool that is activated by Win+Q, and I type what I want to run. Usually its just 2-3 first letters of alias name, like bash and autocompletion kicks in. Mouse is used mostly to position windows sometimes. Keyboard is just much faster..
Do you use multiple desktops? Windows seems terrible at positioning windows, I can't work out how to tell a window to move to the next desktop, say, or just start on a particular desktop (nevermind start at a particular position). Instead it takes a lot of mouse work just to setup after a boot/reboot.
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've never seen the point of multiple desktops, but I went and found out the answer to the first question anyway. You hold down win+tab, a nice layout appears showing all your windows and all your desktops, and you drag a window to a desktop.
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.
Yes, I already use win+tab, but that is quite a lot of mouse work, what I was hoping for was shortcuts like KDE has 'move app to next desktop', or even better there was some hidden menu or trick to get apps to open on the desktop I want them to live on.
Yeah I am, but im on very old Windows.. Also, I never bother that much about windows positioning. Because most stuff is usually maximized already, hence I often use alt+tab to switch. As for multiple desktops, I use Desktops 2.0 with is great little utility to create 4 virtual desktops. You can switch between them using Win+[1-4] so again, keyboard shortcuts. You cannot move windows between desktops but its not issue for me. I like this feature actually. I treat those desktops like some contexts. Basic, Work, VM.. So, apps cannot escape given desktop.. And apps are nicely segregated this way. Switch is instant.
I'm curious what extras you can do with your tool. I use spotlight style search with Microsoft powertoys with good effect. Admitidly stuff like unit conversion doesn't come up often but very helpful for finding files and apps compared to Windows search.
Absolutly no extras. I used to use SlickRun with is much more heavier tool, but I never ever used those extras. And since I started to using Desktops 2.0, I had to write my own tool that was aware of virtual desktops. Everything else I handle from bash (Cygwin).
> My hand is usually already on the mouse. Switching apps, scrolling text etc.
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 was surprised that Trackpoint-style devices still remain a niche product since it explicitly solves the "I need to move the cursor but don't want to reach for the mouse" problem.
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.
Even outside of the “hacker” community, keyboard has always been associated with higher expertise. Average “MS Word” user - Navigate through various menus to find what they want to do. Power Users - Memorized all the “shortcuts”.
I think that’s mostly what it is. A keyboard (and a bunch of memorizing), gives mastery over the applications UI.
I still miss Wordperfect for that reason: messing around with Word wysiwyg, even with people who have decades of experience, is just painful to watch or do.
> I don't get the hype of keyboard == hacker mentality.
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.
It's an elitism thing. Notice the terminology "investing time to dramatically speed up workflow". This is the mantra that the keyboard-only adherents have latched onto, and extend to EVERYTHING, including things that are perfectly serviced via mouse control, or don't even need speeding up.
Arguing with them is like arguing with audiophiles.
The irony is that the side accusing keyboard users of elitism is asking them to respect everyone's preferences! Sure, but the keyboard users didn't start this discussion either.
What strikes me as odd is that this browser is not in a terminal, but in a window. So no usage through SSH, no terminal benefits, which are the origin of the keyboard-oriented workflow.
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.
> 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?
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.
You use the browser only to browse? We have all kinds of, usually quite shitty, web apps all types of LoB, ERP, etc. There is a lot of workflow to improve on.
For text editors or IDEs, basically contexts where we expect a lot of typing, I get why sticking to the keyboard is desirable. I don't get how it's better to browse the web without using the mouse. Most of the time on the web I just read, not type.
>Most of the time on the web I just read, not type.
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.
I think an important difference between how I use vim and how I use a web browser is that in vim I need to type frequently. Though I may spend most time in normal mode in vim, I still need to switch to insert mode to make edits very frequently. With my normal web browsing it's not the case, so I'm more comfortable with a mouse for that. But I realise that this depends largely on the specific use case for web browsing. Reading blog posts is quite different from reading some documentation where one needs to search and backtrack frequently, for example, although both are done on a web browser. The latter involves the keyboard more frequently so would benefit from a keyboard-centric interface more.
I wonder how much of that is how and when one comes up in the industry. I learned a little vi at uni only by necessity after years of DOS and Windows 3/9x. It felt so awkward. Decades later I only use vi on servers, but slowly its macro ('normal') mode has grown on me.
For me, I’m often using the web as a reference while programming. It’s nice to be able to flip over to it (using the keyboard) and use the same familiar key bindings I’m using while in my workflow.
That's indeed a nice use case. In general keeping to the keyboard can be helpful in the context of typing, but if I'm just reading news or blog posts or watching videos I'd go with a mouse.
For best ergonomics, both should be well supported.
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.
“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.
I guess it depends on the kind of application. I use the keyboard a lot, but I'd kill myself if I had to use the git command-line interface. Once I bought Sublime Merge, I stopped learning what was (and still is) a waste of time to me. I'm faster with a global visual description and a mouse for some tools.
That is a really biased way to spin things. Of course virtual keyboards are the worst of both worlds. And lining up a mouse on multiple axes is just an odd way to look at it -- on a keyboard you need to line up your fingertip on three axes for every keystroke, if you are wanting to go to that level of detail.
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 completely natural if you do it often. So is using a pen on a tablet. Whatever you use, you get so used to it that is it an extension of your own hands or whatever you use to control input. Your own bias is showing in the assumption that you can develop muscle memory for keys but not other input devices, or that because links are in different places, the mouse becomes cumbersome.
You can’t develop muscle memory when your target movement isn’t the same.
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.
Touchpads don’t solve for muscle memory for the same reasons mouses don’t.
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.
> Touchpads don’t solve for muscle memory for the same reasons mouses don’t.
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’ll happily be leaping over hundreds of lines of text with one or two swipes whilst you are sitting there
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.
> 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?
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.
> I don't get the hype of keyboard == hacker mentality
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)
As a younger person, I've never really been alive for a computer that had no mouse.
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.
I think you're projecting a bit. I'm sure there are a few weird KEYBOARD VS MOUSE people that occupy the same bizarre neurotic domain space as TABS VS SPACES, but most people just have their own personal preference and leave it at that.
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.
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.