But the experiment does not show that the mouse is faster than the "keyboard". It shows that the mouse is faster than using the cursor (arrow) keys for a task where doing the latter would obviously by extremely slow. For me, "using the keyboard" means typing ":1,$s/|/e/g". Say there are 100 instances of "|" to replace. Which do you think will be faster?
Lets ignore the fact that this is a search and replace since that just makes the contest painfully unfair. Normally when using a good text editor like emacs or vim and you're moving somewhere from far away you do a search. Or if you move manually you start out moving by paragraphs, then by sentences, then by words, then finally by characters when you get to the right word. But using the arrow keys you go the same speed the whole time no matter how far away you are. I understand that Word might not have all those fancy movement modes, but it does let you go faster by using Ctrl-Arrow and I don't see why Tog didn't at least let his test subject do that.
Indeed. I'm at a loss trying to understand why he thought he was demonstrating anything interesting. There would be no harm, except that now and then you hear people claim that it has been proven, by studies, that the mouse is faster than the keyboard. I suppose they are quoting people who are paraphrasing people who have sort of heard of this trivial study.
