One of the quickest ways to increase your productivity on the computer is to go commando: stop using the mouse. When you stop relying on the mouse for everything, you're forced to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Jeremy Miller calls this the first step to coding faster. I agree.
âUnfortunately, navigating through websites is nearly impossible without a mouse, due to the highly mouse-centric nature of HTML. Iâve given up on trying.â
You can navigate in Firefox by hitting â/â and then typing in the text of the link that you want to go to. It doesnât neatly solve the problem of more graphics-heavy interfaces, but when youâre just surfing around pages with lots of text and a few links, /-typeahead-searching plus PageUp/PageDown is an improvement over the mouse.
I canât wait for the day when the cursor follows my eye movements so I no longer need to waste my time switching between the keyboard and mouse. Hook up a camera that monitors where Iâm looking and places the cursor there. Couple that with some basic voice commands and Iâd be happy to get rid of my mouse.
BTW, Linux users-- try tilda. It pulls a terminal down from the top of the screen like the Quake2 console on a keypress. I have it configured to come down when I press F1. Then you can run programs maximized (no more stupid window micromanagement) but still have a terminal handy for any quick purpose.
And OSX users get the same with Visor. Very cool stuff. And thereâs also a dashboard terminal (also Visorâs much better) so you can have 2 different terminals available at any time on fast-access shortcuts
You can navigate in Firefox by hitting â/â and then typing in the text of the link that you want to go to
Or you enable typeahead and you donât even need to hit â/â
I picked up the habit of keeping my left hand on the 'board and my right on the mouse from one of the best photoshop guys Iâve seen. This way, you always have access to whichever method is fastest.
Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing, but the stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
I have no doubt that for certain activities the mouse is faster. The problem with Togâs statement is that he doesnât qualify it at all.
HTML is a fine example of a UI thatâs much faster to use with a mouse. Navigating HTML via keyboard, even with the Firefox plugins that make it easier, is still quite painful.
But thereâs just no way you can tell me that this:
Move the mouse to the username field.
Click the mouse button.
Type a username.
Move the mouse to the password field.
Click the mouse button.
Type a password.
Move the mouse to the login button.
Click the mouse button.
is faster than this:
Type a username.
Press the Tab key.
Type a password.
Press the Enter key.
Itâs un-possible!
navigate in Firefox by hitting â/â and then typing in the text of the link that you want to go to
Thatâs not really navigation, itâs incremental search. It is admittedly a fine line, but not quite the same thing. Try âfindingâ an image you need to click on, for example.
Totally. I work with developers that use the mouse with toolbar buttons to step through code in the VS debugger. It absolutely pains me to watch it.
My favorite feature of Vista is the integrated search in the Start Menu, just because it makes it so much easier to launch apps using only the keyboard.
You didnât read the Apple study. I went through it rather closely a while back, and from what I remember it has nothing to do with the actual speed of command execution - youâre absolutely right, you can always put commands in faster with the keyboard - and everything to do with leaving your mind free to attempt higher thought. I like to think of it in terms of RAM - when clicking with a mouse, youâre just clicking. Youâre not thinking, âHm. Is paste-just-formats ctrlshftp or ctrlshftaltp.â Youâre thinking about whether the equation youâre pasting is going to apply to the fifteen cells on your left. So your RAM isnât loading a whole bunch of (say) CISC operations. Itâs running a smooth UI you donât need to think much about.
So for mundane tasks you consistently repeat, youâre completely right. Stop using the mouse and you will get faster. But if youâre talking about memorizing every single key combo in the interface, well, that tends towards extremely specified knowledge. Which can speed you up, but can also limit you when choosing the next toolâŚ
Thereâs one particular co-worker of mine who claims to know every little trick and shortcut there is to know for working with Office. He might. But when you look at things he has actually attempted to accomplish, well, the results are not as effective as they should be. Know anyone like this?
You know, Iâve been keyboarding around for a long time, now⌠but there is a danger: whenever an application forces itself to the fore and throws a message box with a dismiss button automatically selected. I hate dismissing those automatically. Itâs a lot of why I detest the MessageBox in general⌠Just a few simple measures⌠a few changes at the API level⌠and weâd never have the problem againâŚ
Anyhow, back on topic: I didnât really start falling back in love with Mac OS until X came along and started letting me keyboard my way through. Now I use XP for the majority of my work, but I still hop into OS X for funsies every now and again. Itâs not a chore like it used to be.
This is the mark of distinction between real engineers and psuedo-engineers.
Real engineers rely on science, and make their decisions based on science.
Pseduo-engineers try to emulate what they think makes real engineers real, and spread opinion based on logic such as âthereâs just no way you can tell me thatâ and âItâs un-possible!â
Further, productivity is not measured in speed of âcodingâ. Unless youâre a monkey implementing pre-designed features without any creativity, speed of entering lines of code is the least factor for your productivity.
Are you a typist or an engineer? Are you a coder or a programmer?
Itâs easy to demonstrate the truth of Togâs report, which Ben pointed out. In fact, I often do this when I am helping someone out, and they are at the keyboard. I will use their mouse to highlight individual characters (and sometimes words) from adjacent lines/applications and right click (because Iâm a power-mouse user, and donât need to travel up to the menu bar, which is a remnant of the days of keyboards) and choose Copy. Then I move the mouse to the destination window, right-click again (itâs really easy) and choose paste. Usually by the fifth character, the person Iâm helping says I am just moving too fast to keep up, and asks me to please use their keyboard, so I will be slow enough they will understand what Iâm doing. Itâs great fun and helps in reductio ad absurdum contexts, too!
âdang
Thought Iâd add my personal favorite for any coders using VS. If you use the General Development Settings in VS2005, CTRL+i does an incremental search (it searches as you type one character at a time), and if it doesnât get what you want the first time, press CTRL+i again and itâll search for the next instance of it. If later on you want to search for the same thing, pressing CTRL+i twice will automatically search for the last thing you searched for.
Not all appls follow a standrd keyboard shortcuts. The most evil one, I think, is ctrl+y. Mordern appls redo while many oldies delete the current line!
I prefer the Eclipse way. You can choose your keyboard shortcuts.
Jay and Dylan, you seem to see this entry as disavowing the mouse. Thatâs not my intent. I want to see people balance their use of the mouse with use of the keyboard, too.
when clicking with a mouse, youâre just clicking. Youâre not thinking
Really? So when you mouse over something you know exactly what that thing is going to do before you click on it? Or maybe you mean thinking in terms of âwhich mouse button do I clickâ versus âwhich of these 104 keys do I pressâ, but even Raskin himself admits the one-button mouse was a huge mistake in retrospect.
speed of entering lines of code is the least factor for your productivity
Well, obviously if someone is typing âAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boyâ into an editor at 200 wpm, that isnât getting us anywhere. Yes, we are all typists as well as programmers. The faster you make your mistakes, the quicker you can correct them.
Speed and efficiency arenât the only factors, but theyâre still important. Consider speed of iterationâŚ
Unfortunately, using keyboard shortcuts can be literally painful. Keep in mind the small number of us that are genetically doomed to suffer through keyboard pain when using what I call âthe clawâ. Any two key combo done on the same hand will send incredible pain into my wrist. Well, in all honesty, the first one is fine, but after about 10 cycles of ctrl+c and ctrl+v, Iâm screaming for my mouse (or my reprogrammable gamepad). When I need to do a two key press, I have to hold down the meta key with one hand and then press the key with the other hand, loosing the benefit of keeping one hand on the mouse.
It may be hard to believe, because it doesnât seem that hard, but repetative stress syndrome is a real thing.
The only reason I bring this up is that Iâve heard nerds mocking people for not using keyboard shortcuts. Not that anyone really cares what obnoxious nerds do, say, or think. I just like putting them in their place.
You wouldnât make fun of someone who used a crutch to walk (or would you?)