Even for like 20 years after mousing became the primary interface, you could still navigate much faster using keyboard shortcuts / accelerator keys. Application designers no longer consider that feature. Now you are obliged to constantly take your fingers off home position, find the mouse, move it 3cm, aim it carefully, click, and move your hand back to home position, an operation taking a couple of seconds or more, when the equivalent keyboard commands could have been issued in a couple hundred milliseconds.
Sounds like I’m glad “home row” style typing fell out of favour. It may be the theoretically fastest way to type eventually, but it seems to lead to pretty rigid behaviour. Adapting to new things as they come along and changing your flow to move with them instead of against them is just a much more comfortable way to live. Even if I only type 80% as fast.
I have no idea what you mean by “fell out of favour”. Does your keyboard not have pips on F and J? People still touch type. Dunno what to tell you.
You’re getting hung up on “home row”. You still have to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back. It’s the same problem, whether or not you know how to type well and stare at your hands.
When I’m “computering” for efficiency, I don’t take my hands off the keyboard. Half of my job is on a standard keyboard, and so familiarizing myself with all the shortcuts and whatnot saves a lot of time versus having to travel back and forth to a mouse or track pad.
When I am just satisfying the dopamine urges, it’s mouse all the way.
Sure. It’s a lowest common denominator interface. With all that comes with that.
I just use a mouse to type in stuff using the on screen keyboard. It’s annoying having to take the ball out and clean it, but you get used to it.
Hey they made new technology where you can just yell at the computer and it’ll understand 60% of what you’re saying.
Sure, it’s not 100% better in all situations. But when you’re unfamiliar with something, almost universally, it’s far more intuitive.
And this doesn’t even take into account things like gaming. I also can’t imagine trying to do visual design things solely with the computer. Like any type of drawing or schematic design.
Being pretty adept at using the keyboard, I’m often frustrated when I find out that the only way to do something is by mouse when there appears that there should be an easy way to do it by keyboard. But, man, I can’t imagine longing for the days before the mouse.
Yes, the mouse is useful in many situations (esp 3d modeling), so I don’t think anyone is arguing that it shouldn’t exist.
The problem, however, is that we’ve standardized on it for everything, to the point where software often ignores a better KB-driven workflow because the mouse one is good enough. “When all you have is a hammer…”
We’ve prioritized “intuitive” over “efficient.” There’s nothing wrong with learning to properly use a tool, and it’s sad that we don’t expect users to put in that modicum of effort. In the 80s and 90s, that’s just how things were, you either learn the tools (often with a handbook) or you don’t use them. The net result was a populace that didn’t need support as much, because they were used to reading the docs. If a component died, the docs would tell you how to diagnose and fix it. These days, those docs just don’t exist, so if the solution isn’t intuitive, you replace it (both hardware and software).
That’s where this frustration comes from. Making things intuitive also means reducing the average person’s understanding of their tools, and the mouse is a symptom of that shift.
I’ve used ion, ratpoison, i3, sawfish, and other tiling window managers for fifteen or more years, all totaled up. There is a great deal of pressure to use a modern desktop environment and it’s a lot of work maintaining my janky bespoke desktop environment functions necessary for a few critical applications. I use KDE’s tiling features and keyboard shortcuts, but it’s a double edged sword because I have to disable all window manager bindings in (for example) Blender and emacs to avoid shadowing important features. Actually, I have re-implemented a lot of my custom KDE shortcuts as emacs bindings as well, so they still work when emacs has the focus. Here’s one:
(cl-flet ((switch-to (name)
(lambda ()
(interactive)
(shell-command (concat "wmctrl -a " name)))))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-1") (switch-to "librewolf"))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-2") (switch-to "konsole"))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-3") (switch-to "signal"))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-4") (switch-to "darktable"))
(global-set-key (kbd "s-5") (switch-to "emacs")))
That functionality (first necessary, then required by guidelines, then expected, and then still usual) disciplined UI designers to make things doable in a clear sequence of actions.
Now they think any ape can make a UI if it knows the new shiny buzzwords like “material design” or “air” or whatever. And they do! Except humans can’t use those UIs.
BTW, about their “air”. One can look at ancient UI paradigms, specifically SunView, OpenLook and Motif (I’m currently excited about Sun history again), Windows 3.*, and also Win9x (with WinXP being more or less inside the same paradigm). And one can see that of these only Motif had anything resembling their “air”. And Motif is generally considered clunky and less usable than the rest of the mentioned (I personally consider OpenLook the best), but compared to modern UIs even Motif does that “air” part the way it seems to make some sense, and feels less clunky, making me wonder how is that even possible.
FFS, modern UI designers don’t even think it’s necessary to clearly and consistently separate buttons and links from text.
And also - freedom in Web and UI design has proven to be a mistake. UIs should be native. Web browsers should display pages adaptively (we have such and such blocks of text and such and such links), their appearance should be decided on the client and be native too, except pictures. Gemini is the right way to go for the Web.
I love how deeply nerdy Lemmy is. I’m a bit of a nerd but I’m not “mice were a mistake” nerd.
It’s also an age thing. My visual processing is getting worse and worse. My disorientation facing a busy screen with literally thousands of objects that can be interacted with by mouse is a cognitive drain compared to a textual interface where I do most of the work abstractly without having to use visual processing at all. Like reading a book vs watching a movie.
I probably have a lot more experience using pre-mouse era computers than most people. It’s like being asked to start using a different language when you are 20. Yeah, you’ll become perfectly fluent for a couple decades… but you’ll also lose that language first when you get old.
I have noticed that millenials navigate multilayer mouse interfaces (like going down a few chained drop down menus) way faster than I ever did. And zoomers use touch screen keyboards almost as well as I ever touchtyped. Brains are only plastic to a degree, and it just plain feels good to use all those neurons that you first laid down when you were young and your mind was infinite.
I don’t think mice were a mistake, but they’re worse for most of the tasks I do. I’m a software engineer and I suck at art, so I just need to write, compile, and test code.
There are some things a mouse is way better for:
- drawing (well, a drawing tablet is better)
- 3d modeling
- editing photos
- first person shooters (KB works fine for OG Doom though)
- bulk file operations (a decent KB interface could work though)
But for almost everything else, I prefer a keyboard.
And while we’re on a tangent, I hate WASD, why shift my fingers over from the normal home row position? It should be ESDF, which feels way more natural…
To an extent. Early 90’s I could navigate WordPerfect in DOS faster than I’ve ever been able to work in MS Word, because it was all keyboard even before I learned proper home key 10 finger typing in high school. Technically my first word processor was Wordstar on one of those Osborne “portable” computers with the 5-inch screen when I was a young kid, but Wordperfect was what I did my first real ‘word processing’ on when I started using it for school projects. So I might just be older in that ‘how do you do fellow kids’ in this sort of discussion.
To this day, I still prefer mc (Midnight Commander, linux flavored recreation of Norton Commander that does have a Windows port (YMMV on the win port)) to navigate filesystems for non-automated file management.
I’ve been thoroughly conditioned for mouse use since the mid-late 90s (I call it my Warcraft-Quake era, we still used keyboard only for Doom 1/2 back in the early days), and I feel like it’s a crutch when I’m trying to do productive work instead of gaming. When I spend a few days working using remote shells, I definitely notice a speed increase. Then a few days later I lose it all again when I’m back on that mouse cursor flow brain.
I call it my Warcraft-Quake era, we still used keyboard only for Doom 1/2 back in the early days
This is my main reason for not pining for the days before the mouse: it made gaming 100000x better. I remember when we first started playing quake, a lot of the guys swore by the keyboard only, until I regularly destroyed them with the mouse. . .and they all switched over.
I’ve also done a lot of graphic design, photo-editing, schematic design, etc. . . and can’t imagine having to do that solely with the keyboard (but again, I’m often like “why isn’t there a keyboard shortcut for this?”).
Also, when it comes to productivity, I guess it depends on what you are doing because usually my big hurdle is not how quickly I can do actions (that is usually more important in video games, tbh), the big hurdle is sitting down and thinking about how to do it correctly.
I have a game controller and a mouse. I don’t use my game controller to code. I don’t use my keyboard to sculpt. The problem isn’t that mice exist at all, its that they are overwhelmingly dominant to the point where most applications do not cater to anything else.
Has the keyboard and mouse versus controller argument finally died? I mean I use a controller for things like Elden Ring and keyboard and mouse for first person or tactics/strategy games.
We proved twenty years ago that keyboard and mouse was better for first person gaming and I was still hearing arguments that controllers were better five years ago.
