[Haskell-cafe] Re: Editor

[Malcolm Wallace]

> >  "* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than
> >     mousing.
> >   * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than
> >     keyboarding."

Even if it is empirically true that mousing is wall-clock faster than
keyboarding, one has to ask the question why users feel internally that
keyboarding wins.  Perhaps it is because using the mouse requires a
cognitive switch from editing the document, to a physical hand-eye
co-ordination task, and back again?  The mental effort of switching
might be harder work than keeping your focus on the document at all
times, and therefore switching _feels_ as if it must be slower.

Of course this assumes that the person is sufficiently skilled at typing
on a keyboard that they do not need to look at it, and hence their eye
can stay with the cursor in a window on the screen.

Perhaps you can find and move your mouse using only peripheral vision,
but even so, the first cognitive task you need to accomplish is to find
the mouse pointer on screen, which is invariably in a different place
from the text cursor, and so drags your attention from one focus to
another.

Regards,
    Malcolm