[Haskell-cafe] Re: Editor

[Jules Bean]

Michael T. Richter wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-22-05 at 10:19 +0200, apfelmus wrote:
>> I can't know whether that's the case, but the fact that virtually all
>> commands are invoked with the keyboard clashes with HID research reported at
>>
>>    http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
>>
>> It adresses the question whether selecting commands in menus with the
>> mouse or accessing them via keyboard shortcuts is faster. The answer is:
>>
>>  "* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than
>>     mousing.
>>   * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than
>>     keyboarding."
> 
> You beat me to the punch.  And to exactly the same URL, in fact.
> 
> I see strong parallels between the insistence that keyboarding is faster 
> than mousing and the insistence that manual memory management is faster 
> than automated memory management.
>


Why not abandon the keyboard, then, and have all your alphanumeric keys 
neatly lined up in menus? Or perhaps click on a picture of a keyboard? ;)

Assuming you wouldn't find the above more convenient, you concede then 
that some things are faster with the keys than the mouse. So it really 
is a question of degree. The mouse excels at tasks like 'select a 
particular large but illdefined (unstructured) chunk of text' : it's a 
very natural gesture. However as a programmer I am often working with 
much more structured text, and operations like 'move forward one 
sub-expression' or 'parenthesise the next two sub-expressions' tilt the 
balance back in favour of the keyboards.

The mouse is an analog input device and it excels at analog operations 
and exploratory ones (poking around menus and tabbed dialogs). The 
keyboard is a digital device and it excels at concise precision, such as 
'let-float the next 4 definitions up one level'.

Jules